Big outage Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp: The reason should have been an incorrect update – Živé.sk

Article from 4.10. from 18:20 we added at the marked places.

Added on October 5 at 8:40 am: Facebook officially announced that the reason for the more than six-hour outage of its social networks and applications on Monday was “incorrect configuration change”, Reuters reported.

The company did not specify in its statement who performed the configuration or whether it was planned.

An unnamed Facebook employee told Reuters even earlier that they thought the outage was caused by an internal error related to Internet traffic. According to security experts, it is also possible that the outage was caused by an unintentional mistake or sabotage of “someone from the inside”.

“We want to make it clear to everyone that at the moment we believe that the main cause of the outage was a misconfiguration,” the Facebook said in a statement. to continue to build a “more resilient infrastructure”.

TASR recalls that Monday’s outage of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger was the longest the Downdetector platform, which deals with Internet monitoring, has ever recorded.

Added on October 5 at 12:05 AM: Late in the evening, before midnight, the content on Facebook started to be displayed to us, both communication platforms also work. We will continue to monitor the situation in the morning. We write in detail below about the possible causes of problems, which are also interesting from the IT point of view.

Added on October 4 at 10:40 pm: The situation around the failure of Facebook and its associated services he explained Meanwhile, journalist Brian Krebs. Referring to the words of Doug Madory from the American company Kentik, which monitors Internet traffic, he informed that the error occurred on the side of the social network.

It is said that someone incorrectly updated the records of the dynamic routing protocol Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which allows the central node of the Internet, the so-called autonomous system, to automatically respond to changes in computer network topology and route Internet traffic between them.

“Simplified, sometime in the morning (late afternoon there, Facebook) removed a map that showed computers around the world how to search for its individual components. As a result, when someone writes Facebook.com to the Internet browser, they have no idea where to look for Facebook.com, and therefore throw out an error page, “Krebs explained.

The “ramenporn” account on Reddit, which allegedly belongs to a member of the Facebook investigation team, came up with information about the bug in BGP. According to him, the problem is that people with physical access to peering routers are not able to implement the repair themselves. On the contrary, those who know are not available for anti-pandemic measures. A copy of the report, which has since disappeared from Reddit, published on Twitter by Mike Doughney.

The whole situation is further complicated by the fact that the outage also affects Facebook’s internal tools and communication platforms. According to Ryan Mac and Sheera Frenkel from the New York Times, people are not only said they can not to work, but they can not they can’t even get into the building because their entry cards don’t work.

Madory did not rule out the possibility that it could be a hacker attack. However, according to him, this possibility is less probable than the fact that Facebook is to blame for the mistake. In the last year, there have been several such large outages caused by incorrect network configuration updates.

Added on October 4 at 9:20 pm: Facebook on the social network Twitter has officially responded that it knows about the problem and is trying to fix the mistake.

This looks tentatively at some DNS issue. However, according to the available information, the problem is quite serious and the solution should require the cooperation of several separate Facebook teams. However, the work is made more difficult by the distance work of many engineers due to coronavirus measures.

Continuation of the original article:

Currently, the three networks – WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, as well as their mobile applications – have a major outage. Its cause is not clear. However, these are all services under the baton of Facebook. For example, users report issues through Downdetector.com.

The first major outages began around 5 pm, with visitors to the main Facebook page, for example, often only seeing information that “the page could not be found.”

WhatsApp and Instagram applications can typically still be used, but do not display new content, respectively. new messages sent or received. It is therefore possible that someone sent you something, but in reality you did not have to receive the message.

TASR materials were used in the article