Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage: "The question of digital centralism is raised"
Mark Zuckerberg's firm suffered a major breakdown on October 4, 2021. REUTERS - Dado Ruvic
Text by: Catherine Potet
3 min
No message on Facebook, no photo on Instagram, nothing on Messenger or WhatsApp.
Monday, October 4, for more than 6 hours, millions of users had to chomp on their brains.
In question: a gigantic failure which according to Facebook, would be due to configuration changes in the servers.
The explanations of Nicolas Arpagian, expert in computer security, director of cybersecurity strategy at Trend Micro, specialist in cyberthreat analysis and author of
La Cybersecurity
at the Presses Universitaires de France.
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RFI: This failure that occurred on Monday is indeed an unprecedented failure, but not a cyberattack?
Indeed. Unheard of, no, because we have already seen server availability issues in the past. And it is true that, in a service which is consumed by billions of people continuously, 24 hours a day, all over the planet, we cannot conceal this type of dysfunction. This is a problem of DNS connections, that is to say the structure that will make the link between the domain names that you write when you go to rfi.fr, and then the IP addresses, that is. that is, the IT structure that hosts these websites and the pages you visit. The only thing is, when it doesn't work, you can't cover it up, it doesn't work, you can't access services.
In any case, this demonstrates the fragility of the Facebook group, which was affected in its entirety for several hours ...
In any case, its need for large IT structures, this requirement for availability and above all also, for users, this raises the question of digital centralism. As long as you entrust all of your speaking capacity on social networks to a single service provider, this can be for individuals of course, but for companies, for institutions. We can clearly see that we are putting the availability of this service in hand and the fact that it will be able to be accessible or not. And so, indeed, we have thus seen a battery of services of Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, the entire galaxy of the Facebook group in fact weakened. And we can see that we are becoming dependent and this raises the question of the ability to express oneself outside of the availability of this single provider,in any case central.
Can this kind of failure happen again and / or often?
It can occur as we go, anyway, to intensify digital uses. So that is consumption that will go at best while remaining stable, and at best increasing. There will be a need for infrastructure investment requirements. And this is the reason why there is also the stock market and financial warning. The stock market price was abused precisely from the moment this failure was identified, quantified in its volume, in its duration. Because indeed, it is not inevitable linked to an inevitable hazard. We need investments and, there, the financial markets ask Facebook what is the nature of your investments, what programs are planned in this area because we will have to be accountable.This is not always in the habit of Mark Zuckerberg's company, which is not readily transparent about its investments and its internal organization.
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To read also:
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp inaccessible several hours after an unprecedented outage
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