A massive outage affected Facebook and its other social media platforms (WhatsApp and Instagram) at 1600 GMT on Monday, October 04 2021. As per Downdetector, a company that analyses web issues, the outage was the most protracted Facebook has ever experienced, with more than 10.6 million reports from around the world, lasting for over 6 hours. This has been a third-time outage after July 2020 and March 2021.
The outage has had massive financial repercussions for FB. Facebook’s stock plummeted 4.9% on Monday, which was its lowest daily drop since November. Not to mention US$545,000 in ad revenue it was losing per hour. In only a few hours, Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth plunged by more than US$7 billion.
What Was the Issue with FB?
The engineering team at Facebook blames faulty configuration modifications. They claim that configuration modification on the backbone routers, which coordinate network traffic between their data centres, caused problems that disrupted communication. This disruption in network traffic had a domino effect on how their data centres communicated, halting their services.
Cybersecurity experts, on the other hand, think that an unintentional error or insider sabotage could also be a possibility. To various news houses, experts have been sharing what they think the problem was.
Alex Stamos is a former security head at FB. He told Wired that a poor configuration or code push to the network management system might be the source of the problem.
Many network experts claim that the primary cause of the outage, as per some experts, was Facebook’s withdrawal from the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route, which holds the IP addresses of its DNS nameservers.
The core internet infrastructure uses BGP to synchronise the information on the path required to reach a given IP address. To make it simple, DNS is a system of addresses to locate websites, while BGP is the roadmap that finds the most effective way to get to that IP address.
Why Did Facebook Take So Long to Fix the Outage Issue?
It was difficult for workers to diagnose and solve the problem since all of Facebook’s internal systems operate from the same place. Facebook employees were reportedly unable to access their internal communication network, Workplace, owing to the outage affecting the security pass system.
Facebook hasn’t said much about what went wrong or how they rectified it. Although, there have been several claims that the social media company dispatched a technical team to its California servers to manually reset the servers that were the source of the problem.
Is It Possible to Avoid Such Outages?
Facebook’s outage isn’t the only one in recent years. Cloudflare had a network outage last year that lasted 27 minutes. A disruption for Internet properties caused by a configuration mistake in their backbone network resulted in a 50% reduction in Cloudflare’s internet traffic.
Such outages show the problems of having a single point of failure for several online services.
Final Thoughts
Facebook and its other platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp are more than social media. WhatsApp has replaced traditional SMS for messaging family and friends. It is also a medium for small business owners to get orders and appointments from their customers. Moreover, all three platforms are massive advertising and engagement platforms for businesses. The outage slowed down businesses and marketing campaigns.