In case you missed it, Facebook was out for a couple of hours late last night and only went up early this morning. The outage included Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Whatsapp.
This not only meant people weren’t able to communicate with friends, but more so, it meant that a lot of businesses that rely on the different Facebook-related platforms were halted. This includes small businesses and even content creators.
Facebook has since explained the outage. In the post, they explained that the outage was caused by “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication.” They added, “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Meanwhile, a blog post from Cloudflare looked into it deeper and saw problems with the Domain Name System (DNS) and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) which all stemmed from the configuration changes that were acknowledged by Facebook.
Upon checking, Cloudflare found that Facebook’s DNS stopped resolving which the blog post explained “as if someone had “pulled the cables” from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.” This was also attributed to the BGP which helps networks with pathing to assist in traffic.
Cloudflare elaborates that Facebook stopped announcing the routes to the DNS prefixes which meant that Facebook DNS servers were unavailable. Its IP addresses remained routed but without the DNS, related services were unavailable.
Because of the outage, people were forced to use other social media platforms like Twitter as well as other messaging apps.
Ram found his love and appreciation for writing in 2015 having started in the gaming and esports sphere for GG Network. He would then transition to focus more on the world of tech which has also began his journey into learning more about this world. That said though, he still has the mentality of "as long as it works" for his personal gadgets.
