What we know about the global outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – Heidi.news

Why it matters. Businesses use WhatsApp services to communicate. Such a prolonged outage represents significant damage for many companies. Ironically, the situation arises just as the New York Times publishes an article titled “Facebook is more vulnerable than we thought” in connection with the revelations of the whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Read also: The whistleblower who plunges Facebook into embarrassment

The situation also gives rise to Twitter mockery as well as other companies like McDo or Reddit. The EHC Biel hockey club has even made a contribution.

Between 15:50 UTC and 15:52 UTC Facebook and related properties disappeared from the Internet in a flurry of BGP updates. This is what it looked like to @Cloudflare. pic.twitter.com/PFw5FR2W5j

– John Graham-Cumming (@jgrahamc) October 4, 2021

Attack or server problem? According to BleepingComputer, the Facebook site accessible via Tor is also inaccessible. At this time, it is not possible to determine with certainty whether this is a server problem or an attack.

According to the tests carried out by the site, it would be a problem of server or a DNS configuration (it is a kind of directory that a computer consults when it connects to a website). It is probably mainly American and European users who are affected by these dysfunctions.

The routing protocol track. Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming on Twitter discusses a related issue to the routing protocol (BGP, border gateway protocol). What other sources seem to confirm as well here.

Johannes B. Ullrich, Dean of Research at the SANS Technology Institute, confirms in a blog post that the problem is with the routing protocol: “The BGP routes that direct traffic to Facebook’s IP address have been erased. The Internet no longer knows where to find Facebook’s IP addresses. As a result, DNS queries fail. ”

Update (7:17 p.m.): Facebook is now aware of the outage and is working on its resolution.

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.

– Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 4, 2021

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said on Twitter that the company is aware of the situation and apologized for the inconvenience.

Update (22:26): According to New York Times, Facebook experts are still identifying the cause of the routing problem, according to an internal memo and employees briefed about the situation. Two members of the company’s security team spoke anonymously to the American daily. According to them, it is unlikely that a cyber attack is involved given the number of services involved.

Facebook has sent a team to one of its California data centers to try to manually reset its servers – NYT

– BNO News (@BNONews) October 4, 2021

Experts believe it to be more of a configuration issue on Facebook’s servers. In principle, when faced with such a problem, companies revert to a previous setup, but Facebook’s situation seems more complicated and requires manual intervention.

Always according to the New York Times, the outage also affected employee devices, including their cell phones and digital badges. For example, they were unable to access certain areas to resolve the problem because they could no longer physically enter the company building.

So, someone deleted large sections of the routing …. that doesn’t mean Facebook is just down, from the looks of it …. that means Facebook is GONE. pic.twitter.com/OCZWPD2okw

– The Academy (@BenjaminEnfield) October 4, 2021

Meanwhile, Twitter users continue to assess the extent of the damage. Like this account which believes that the site is not simply shut down, but has disappeared altogether.

Update (10:43 p.m.): Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer has specified on Twitter that the company’s engineers are always working on debugging and restoring services as soon as possible.

He presented his “sincere apologies” to all those affected by the problems encountered by Facebook services. “We are experiencing network issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore services as fast as possible.”