The Reason Behind The Massive Global Outage Across Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp Last Night

Smrutisnat Jena

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, all swan dived into a blackout last night, leaving most of us no option but to whine about it on Twitter. Although Facebook did release a statement regarding the same, it was as ambiguous as Mark Zuckerberg’s facial expressions. 

We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry. We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.

-Facebook

And we are yet to have an official answer for all of this to happen, we know that all of Zuckerberg’s apps practically fell off the internet wagon last night, when its Domain Name System records became unreachable. 

WhatsApp

Troy Mursch, chief research officer of cyberthreat intelligence company Bad Packets told Wired that Facebook’s outage seemed to have been a DNS problem, however claiming that this was just symptomatic of a larger problem. 

Forbes

According to experts, the problem is that Facebook has withdrawn the Border Gateway Protocol route containing the IP addresses of its DNS nameservers.If you consider the DNS, a phone book then the BGP is its navigation system. deciding how the data travels to the information superhighway.

You can think of it like a game of telephone… But they (smaller networks) announce this route to their neighbour and their neighbour will propagate it out to their peers. It’s a lot of jargon, but easy to put plain: Facebook has fallen off the internet’s map. If you try to ping those IP addresses right now? “The packets end up in a black hole,

-Troy Mursch

Now, BGP just disappearing is not a common problem and despite the lack of clarity on Facebook’s part, experts believe that the answer was a misconfiguration on Facebook’s part.

It appears that Facebook has done something to their routers, the ones that connect the Facebook network to the rest of the internet

-John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare,

Well, there’s definitely a lot more to it than any of us know or are qualified to comment on. So, for now, this will have to suffice.

Checkout: WhatsApp Hacks

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