Facebook has apologised for the services of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram stopping last week for several hours on Monday.
Basically the issue occurred due to the Facebook systems stopping talking to the internet as a whole.
Facebook explained this by saying, “configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication” This ended up bring all the operations online to a stop.
The internet is constantly experiencing issues, servers are down across the globe, however this doesn’t usually affect internet.
However, Facebook has their own larger networks – known as autonomous systems. Therefore, when visiting Facebook or one of the subsidiaries, the back-end system used is what allows you to connect to the servers.
This is called Border Gateway Protocol and it works like Waze, picking the best route for you to access the website you wish to arrive at.
Facebook stopped providing the location that the users need to arrive at to the BGP, therefore it couldn’t send people to where they wanted to go.
Now for most it was actually quite nice to have pause from social media for the day, however for small businesses relying on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram for work, this did cause some concerns.
The other issue is that many companies have swapped their services to Facebook Business or use WhatsApp to communicate with colleagues due to the pandemic, this suddenly stopped.
There were many making jokes on Twitter regarding the outage once it had first begun, but those jokes quickly stopped when people realised the issue was more than a little glitch.
It is not known yet what caused the outage, whether it be human error, a bug or a serious hack, but the conspiracy theories are flying.
Facebook has previously experienced outages, but these are usually repaired within a few minutes, not a whole day.
Of course we may never know what caused this outage, whether it was a disgruntled employee or a Russian joke, what we do know is that the outage will have hit Mark Zuckerberg’s wallet, shares dived 5%, which could translate to anything up to $6bn.
