A world revolt was about to break out yesterday, the day in which Facebook and all social networks connected to the name of Mark Zuckeberg they went down. All platforms controlled by the tech giant, including Instagram e Whatsapp they went haywire. Many have thought of a conspiracy as the disservice was decidedly long: well 6 hours. In reality, the problem was of a technical nature. Let's see what happened together.
The longest disservice ever involved Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, all social networks connected to Mark Zuckeberg. What happened?
Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp down all over the world for about 6 hours. The world has gone into the ball, if we consider that now everything runs on social media. But what happened to grace? The problem arose from a worry of a technical nature that below we try to explain in a simple but exhaustive way.
There appears to have been a number of errors at the DSN, or those "bridge" services that serve to merge the individual platforms concerned (Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) to the respective IPs of the servers. In essence, these bridges have collapsed and this connection has failed. But how is it possible that all this has happened?
In accordance to explained by the vice president of Cloudflare Dane Knecht, all Facebook BGP routes have been canceled. However, it did not reveal (and perhaps better that way) who deleted them. But now let's see what BGPs are. In essence, these are protocols that allow you to connect routers belonging to different autonomous systems, such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.
In fact, therefore, Facebook has become a "isolated" system, unable to communicate with the outside world as these bridges and connections have failed. However, there are some users who have been able to access the platforms: obviously the extensions who can connect in a completely manual way to the servers.
Is this good for other social "adversaries"? Absolutely not!
One will think: well, but then platforms such as Telegram and social "adversaries" of Facebook and Instagram will have seen a surge in registrations and uses. Well, that's it but not all that glitters is gold. Precisely because the three social networks indicated above did not work, the entire users poured onto the competitor's platforms, congesting the entire network. The extremely high number of users has in fact implied the fact that Telegram also had problems.
Santosh Janardhan, Facebook CTO said during the blackout:
The engineering teams have found that some configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers have caused problems that have interrupted communication..
This disruption in network traffic has had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt. We want to clarify at this time that we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data has been compromised.
So, as a response to those users who immediately accused Facebook and company of having deliberately caused this problem for take hold of the data, the CTO of the social network reassured that these are safe. Or rather, there is no evidence that the data was stolen.
One thing is certain: after yesterday the US giant saw decrease its stock on the stock exchange drastically, leading to the loss of billions of dollars. For the moment it is not clear who or what actually caused the disservice. It could be an attack hacker as of a simple flaw.
Through | ArtTechnica
