Facebook suffered a major outage across several countries on Monday for more than 5 hours. Users reported having issues accessing Facebook apps like Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook itself on the website Downdetector, which tracks outages and issues across various websites and services.
Security experts identified the problem as a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) withdrawal of the IP address prefixes Facebook’s Domain Name servers was hosted. This made it impossible for users to resolve Facebook and related domains names and reach services. Effects were visible globally; for example, Swiss Internet service provider Init7 recorded a massive drop in internet traffic to the Facebook servers after the change in the Border Gateway Protocol. Information from Cloudflare at exactly 15:39 UTC was that Facebook caused a handful of BGP to refresh. This includes the withdrawal of routes connected to the IP (internet protocol) prefixes attached to all of their legit name servers. This caused a major stoppage to DNS servers in reaching Facebook’s from the Internet. At 15:50 UTC, the domains associated with Facebook had lapsed from the caches in all vital public or general resolvers. A little before 21:00 UTC, Facebook resumed announcing BGP updates, with Facebook’s domain name becoming resolvable again at 21:05 UTC.
The internet outage cut off facebook’s from communicating internally and prevented her employees from receiving any external emails. It also denied them access to corporate directories and to authenticate some Google documents and Zoom services. It was equally reported by the NYT (New York Times) that Facebook employees couldn’t have access to conference rooms with their allotted security badges. It’s also important to state that Facebook’s Downdetector, whose work is to monitor network outages, recorded over 10 million problems, which was the largest figure for any outage to date. Steve Gibson, a security researcher, said a “Routine BGP update went wrong,” locking out “people with remote access” to the servers to fix the mistake. People with physical access do not have the authorization to correct the error. The Google Public DNS service also slowed down due to the outage. At the same time, users of Gmail, TikTok, and Snapchat also experienced slowdowns. The reliable CNBC reported the outage as the worst suffered by Facebook since the year 2008. During the day of the outage, shares in the company dropped by nearly 5%, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth fell by more than $6 billion. As reported by Fortune and Snopes, Facebook had already lost $60million in their advertising revenues.
As of the time of writing this article, Facebook hasn’t stated the cause of the outage. Experts say that people trying to refresh Facebook on their phones or computers likely prolonged the outage.
In a tweet addressing the outage, Facebook said, “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.”
The outage happened some hours after a former Facebook worker was interviewed on the popular 60minutes show about the social media apps serving as harmful tools for teenagers and being the carrier of misinformation. It was said that the whistleblower has was called to give testimony before Congress last Tuesday. However, a Facebook employee told NBC News that there was no reason to suspect foul play was involved.
