Why did the applications "Facebook", "WhatsApp" and "Instagram" go out of service?
Hundreds of millions were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, highlighting the world's dependence on the platforms of the Silicon Valley giant.
But what caused the malfunction?
What do you say "Facebook"?
In a blog post apologizing to everyone affected by the group's outage, Santosh Janardan, Vice President of Infrastructure at Facebook, said: "Changes in settings in the core routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused problems that led to the outage. This contact.
Can this be explained in a simple way?
Cybersecurity experts believe that the problem boils down to something called BGP, or Inter-Gateway Routing Protocol, the system the Internet uses to choose the fastest route to transmit packets of information.
Sami Selim of the data center company Telehouse compared BGP to air traffic control.
In the same way that air traffic controllers sometimes make changes to flight schedules, "Facebook has updated these routes," he said.
But this update contained a fundamental error.
It is not yet clear how and why, but Facebook's routers sent a message to the Internet that the company's servers no longer existed.
- Why did it take so long to fix the problem?
Experts say Facebook's technical infrastructure is extraordinarily dependent on its own systems, and that has proven disastrous on both sides.
After Facebook sent the routers update, its engineers were taken out of the system that allows them to report that the update was, in fact, a bug.
So they couldn't solve the problem.
"Usually it is very useful not to put all your eggs in one basket," said Pierre Bony of Avnec, the association that manages domain names in France.
"For security reasons, Facebook had to focus heavily on its infrastructure," he added.
"It simplifies things on a daily basis, but because everything is in the same place, when there is a problem in that place, it is impossible to do anything."
An indirect effect of the malfunction was that some Facebook employees were unable to enter their buildings because their security badges no longer worked, further slowing the response.
Is this unprecedented?
Social media outages are not uncommon: Instagram alone experienced more than 80 outages last year in the US, according to Toltest.
But the outage that Facebook faced this week is rare in terms of its duration and impact.
There is also precedent for BGB being the root cause of a social network outage.
In 2008, when a Pakistani ISP was trying to block YouTube for local users, it inadvertently shut down the global site for hours.
What is the effect of the interruption?
Among “Facebook”, “Instagram”, “WhatsApp” and “Facebook Messenger”, “billions of users have been affected,” according to Down Detector.
And the company "Facebook", whose shares fell by about five percent due to the service outage, confirmed that "there is no evidence that users' data was compromised as a result of this failure."
But even though it lasted a few hours, the impact of the holiday was huge. Facebook's services are vital to many companies around the world, and users complained of being cut off from their livelihoods.
Also, Facebook accounts are commonly used to log into other sites that have encountered additional problems due to the company's technical failure.
Meanwhile, rival instant messaging services reported that they took advantage of the glitch that brought WhatsApp and Messenger to a halt.
The Telegram application moved from the 56th most downloaded free application in the United States to the 5th place within a day, according to the specialized company Sensor Tower.
Another notable effect is that many domain name registrars list Facebook.com as available for purchase.
"There was absolutely no reason to believe that Facebook.com would be sold as a result, but it's fun to think about the billions of dollars it could bring in on the open market," said Brian Krebs, a cybersecurity expert.
Follow our latest local and sports news and the latest political and economic developments via Google news
:
#Facebook,
#What's Up,
#instagram
#Breakdown ,
#stopservice