Facebook experienced its biggest outage in its history which took down WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and even Facebook’s internal tools for more than six hours on Monday night. The social giant blamed the failure of its platforms on configuration changes to the routers that coordinate network traffic. “This disruption in network traffic has had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, shutting down our services,” Santosh Janardhan, Facebook vice president of infrastructure, said in a blog post.
The company in a blog post posted Monday night did not say who performed the configuration change and if it was planned. However, some reports indicate that the outage was caused by an internal error.
Here’s what we know about the biggest crash ever on Facebook:
- On Monday, Facebook and all of its platforms – WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Oculus, as well as the company’s internal tools all went offline at 9 p.m. in India, and remained offline for six hours.
- Internal company tools and even offices that required security badges were made inaccessible due to this issue, resulting in further disruption and delays in finding a fix.
- A poster on Reddit affirming Being an insider also said shrinking data center staff due to pandemic measures made it more difficult to implement the fix.
- Facebook blamed the problem on a faulty configuration change but didn’t give more details.
- Quite simply, routers are used to coordinate data inside Facebook, and a change in their settings meant that Facebook’s computers couldn’t talk to each other. DNS, the “address book” that is used to find Facebook services on the Internet, was not working, because of the faulty BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) update, which is used to send data to the right place, according to an insider Publish on Reddit.
- “Facebook basically locked their keys in their car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
- Facebook shares fell 4.9%, their biggest daily decline since last November.
- “To all the businesses large and small, families and individuals who depend on us, I’m sorry,” Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook. tweeted.
- With Facebook down, Twitter reported above-normal usage, which led to issues accessing posts and direct messages.
- Signal also took advantage of the WhatsApp outage, Tweeter that millions of new users signed up on Monday.
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