Rival instant messaging services, meanwhile, reported that they had benefited from the fact that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger were down. ![]() In 2008, when a Pakistani internet service provider was attempting to block YouTube for domestic users, it inadvertently shut down the global website for several hours.īetween Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, "billions of users have been impacted by the services being entirely offline", the Downdetector tracking service said.įacebook, whose shares fell nearly five percent over the outage, has stressed there is "no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime".īut even though it lasted just a few hours, the impact of the shutdown ran deep.įacebook's services are crucial for many businesses around the world, and users complained of being cut off from their livelihoods.įacebook accounts are also commonly used to log in to other websites, which faced additional problems due to the company's technical meltdown. There is also a precedent for BGP meddling being at the root of a social media shutdown. This week's Facebook outage was rare in its length and scale, however. Social media outages are not uncommon: Instagram alone has experienced more than 80 in the past year in the United States, according to website builder ToolTester. The knock-on effects of the shutdown included some Facebook employees being unable to even enter their buildings because their security badges no longer worked, further slowing the response. "That streamlines things on a daily basis-but because everything is in the same place, when that place has a problem, nothing works." "For security reasons, Facebook has had to very strongly concentrate its infrastructure," he said. ![]() "Normally it's good not to put all your eggs in one basket," said Pierre Bonis of AFNIC, the association that manages domain names in France. ![]() Why did it take so long to fix the problem?Įxperts say Facebook's technical infrastructure is unusually reliant on its own systems-and that proved disastrous on Monday.Īfter Facebook sent the fateful routing update, its engineers got locked out of the system that would allow them to communicate that the update had, in fact, been an error. It's not yet clear how or why, but Facebook's routers essentially sent a message to the internet announcing that the company's servers no longer existed. In the same way that air traffic controllers sometimes make changes to flight schedules, "Facebook did an update of these routes," Slim said.īut this update contained a crucial error. Sami Slim of data centre company Telehouse compared BGP to "the internet equivalent of air traffic control". In an apologetic blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, said that "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication".įacebook explained Tuesday the outage was "caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making."Ĭyber experts think the problem boils down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol-the system the internet uses to pick the quickest route to move packets of information around.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |