Here's what caused the longest Facebook outage last night
Here's what caused the longest Facebook outage last night
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
- Outage
took down Facebook's internal tools, third-party login services too
- Initially,
DNS issues were found to cause it
- Later,
experts clarified misconfiguration could've caused BGP routing to fail
- Facebook's
statement said data centers couldn't communicate with each other
- Google
didn't miss the opportunity for some tongue-in-cheek humor
Collateral damage
Outage took down Facebook's internal tools, third-party login
services too
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
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