In what seemed like eternity in this social media generation, there was a longest outage which led to Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram down.
Perhaps, as we write this article, the services are fully restored now, and the outage lasted for over six hours, as per Facebook.
It blamed an internal technical issue, which not only affected Facebook’s services, but reportedly also employees’ work passes and email.
But the company said there was “no evidence that user data was compromised”.
What led to Facebook, WhatsApp & Instagram down?
Cybercrime and Cyber security specialists have listed down a cause, known as BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol issue.
Simply put, it is the protocol that runs the internet or makes it work. Since the internet is a network of networks, BGP is the mechanism that bounds it together. When the BGP doesn’t work, internet routers can’t really figure out what to do and that leads to the internet not working. The routers — big ones — keep up on updating other possible routes that are used to deliver network packets to the last possible source. In this case, Facebook platforms were the last point of destination and BGP problem meant Facebook was unable to tell other networks know that it was on the internet.
What does Facebook have to say about the outage?
In an official blog post, the social media giant said that “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Facebook made it clear that it wasn’t a hack or cyberattack. “We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime,” the social media giant said in a blog post.
In addition to the disruption to people, businesses and others that rely on the company’s tools, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a financial hit.
Fortune’s billionaire tracking website late Monday said Zuckerberg’s personal fortune plunged by nearly $6 billion from the prior day to land at just under $117 billion. That’s quite big a number!
It was a global outage, one of the biggest ever!
Were you effected with the outage and how long did it last?
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