Here's what caused the longest Facebook outage last night

 Here's what caused the longest Facebook outage last night

Written by Chandraveer Mathur 

Last updated onOct 05, 2021, 11:19 am

 Here’s why Facebook and its subsidiary services went down last night 

Late last night, popular social media platform Facebook and all its subsidiaries, including WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, suffered a global outage that lasted nearly six hours.In the wake of the outage, alongside the memes, reports have surfaced suggesting it was caused by something known as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing.Here's why it caused the outage. 

In this article

Collateral damage

Outage took down Facebook's internal tools, third-party login services too

The Facebook service outage last night took down all Facebook-owned platforms and services, including its internal webpages for employees (confirmed by tipster Jane Manchun Wong) and login services for third-party apps and platforms (confirmed by Pokémon GO developer Niantic).Soon after the outage, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp separately tweeted acknowledgments of the outage. Facebook attempted to vaguely explain the cause via a blog post. 

Probing

Initially, DNS issues were found to cause it

Initial speculation suggested the issue was caused by a Domain Name System (DNS) issue. This is because the DNS is like the internet's phonebook. It links URLs and hostnames in your browser's address bar to the correct IP address where the website/webpage is hosted. However, experts suggested that DNS is just the symptom and the underlying issue is BGP routing. 

Explanation

Later, experts clarified misconfiguration could've caused BGP routing to fail

The BGP routing system gives information the correct routes to take on the data superhighway. Due to a misconfiguration, it appeared as though the BGP routes vanished, sending all the queries reaching Facebook services into a bottomless abyss. WIRED reported that the BGP misconfiguration appears to have started at Facebook's end, bringing all its services down. The subsequent Facebook statement vaguely corroborated this theory. 

Corroboration

Facebook's statement said data centers couldn't communicate with each other

Facebook's official statement in the aftermath of the outage said the issue was caused by "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers." This reportedly set off a chain reaction affecting how the data centers communicate, bringing services to a grinding halt. Facebook added that the inability to use outage-stricken internal tools further complicated diagnosis and rectification operations. 

Twitter Post

Google didn't miss the opportunity for some tongue-in-cheek humor


 https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/the-reason-behind-facebook-s-six-hour-outage-last-night/story

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Report: World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China

World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 ·           A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media  reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling.  “You barely feel that the patient is 3,000 kilometers away,”  he said.
Read more

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2022 - 04:15 AM   A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel. A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is  flops , or  floating point operations per second . In this visualization,  Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu uses  November 2021 data from  TOP500  to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison. Ranking by Teraflops Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used  teraflops  as our comparison metric. 1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops. Supercomputer Fugaku  was completed in March 202
Read more

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car Stealer's Wheel? Seattle police department quotes "Watchmen" movie in a recap of the recent arrest. Tech Culture by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper December 4, 2016 5:00 PM PST It's maybe the most satisfying arrest we can imagine. Seattle police caught an alleged car thief by enlisting the help of car maker BMW to both track and then remotely lock the luckless criminal in the very car he was trying to steal. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, deputy director of communications for the Seattle Police Department, posted a witty summary of the event on the SPD's blog on Wednesday. Turns out if you're inside a stolen car, it's perhaps not the best time to take a nap. "A car thief awoke from a sound slumber Sunday morning (Nov. 27) to find he had been remotely locked inside a stolen BMW, just as Seattle police officers were bearing down on him," Spangenthal-Lee wrote. The suspect found a ke
Read more