Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world’s reliance on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant.
But what actually caused the outage?
In an apologetic blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, said that “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication”.
– Can you explain that in plain English? –
Sami Slim of data centre company Telehouse compared BGP to “the internet equivalent of air traffic control”.
But this update contained a crucial error.
– Why did it take so long to fix the problem? –
After Facebook sent the fateful routing update, its engineers got locked out of the system that would allow them to communicate that the update had, in fact, been an error. So they couldn’t fix the problem.
“For security reasons, Facebook has had to very strongly concentrate its infrastructure,” he said.
The knock-on effects of the shutdown included some Facebook employees being unable to even enter their buildings because their security badges no longer worked, further slowing the response.
Social media outages are not uncommon: Instagram alone has experienced more than 80 in the past year in the United States, according to website builder ToolTester.
There is also a precedent for BGP meddling being at the root of a social media shutdown.
– And the outage’s impact? –
Facebook, whose shares fell nearly five percent over the outage, has stressed there is “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime”.
Facebook’s services are crucial for many businesses around the world, and users complained of being cut off from their livelihoods.
Rival instant messaging services, meanwhile, reported that they had benefited from the fact that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger were down.
And among the more curious side-effects, several domain name registration companies listed Facebook.com as available for purchase.
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