Facebook has explained the reasons behind the fall of all its services, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
For six hours, none of the services associated with Facebook worked. They were chaotic moments, in which many people discovered what it was like to have the Internet without the giant that has been with us for so many years; and many liked it, and many others, not so much.
Although there were many rumors about the real reason for the attack, including employee sabotage due to the latest Facebook leaks, or a massive DDOS (denial of service) attack, from the outset it seemed that something was wrong within the Facebook network. .
why facebook went down
Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure Santosh Janardhan confirmed this in a blog post just as services returned to normal last night. Although he doesn’t go into detail, he does talk about “configuration changes” to the routers that coordinate traffic between Facebook’s data centers.
During the hours of the fall, a rumor jumped that Facebook’s servers had been hacked, and that the information was available for sale on the so-called ‘Dark Web’. However, Facebook has found no evidence that user data has been compromised, and security experts have warned that the allegedly published data is likely to be a scam attempt.
But what configuration changes are you referring to? The key to understanding this bug is that when we use one of the Facebook apps, we don’t connect directly to its server; Facebook is too big for that. First, apps and websites connect to routers, which ‘route’ our connection to the appropriate server within Facebook’s internal network; to figure out how to redirect those connections, they need a routing table, basically a list of IP addresses of Facebook’s servers. Including the DNS server, which is the one in charge of ‘translating’ the URLs (for example, facebook.com) with the corresponding IP address.
Although Facebook has not confirmed it, the general consensus is that those are the parties that have failed in this case. The big question is how it is possible that something similar has happened; it may be a simple case of employees touching something they shouldn’t (it wouldn’t be the first time this has happened in internet history), but Facebook hasn’t said anything about it.
why did everything fail
When an Internet giant like Facebook fails, the consequences are felt beyond its platform. Facebook attracts a significant amount of traffic every day, and when those users can’t connect, they look for alternatives that aren’t up to the task. This massive transfer of users was what caused problems in the rest of the services.
Telegram was one of the first to fall, after users could not use WhatsApp, although it could benefit from all this mess. Twitter also began to suffer from the number of users who searched for information about the status of Facebook. Even Google had difficulty running Gmail correctly due to the growth in emails sent.
Even virtual reality was affected. Oculus device users were unable to sign in, as controversially, . Devices like the Oculus Quest 2 stopped working, as they were unable to perform the initial check against Facebook’s servers; users were left without access to their games.
But without a doubt, the most affected were the apps based on Facebook. In addition to WhatsApp and Instagram, the apps that use our Facebook account to log in, or those that use its functions, stopped working immediately, something for which Facebook has apologized to the developers, but which highlights the potential problem of depending on a third party for your service.
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