Facebook, the social media conglomerate temporarily died on Monday for six hours, and I am sure that you all must already know. WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and some other Facebook Inc. services were offline and all we kept on doing was switch from Wi-Fi to Mobile Data and vice versa.
Anyhow, after hours of speculations, discussions, weird panic, and questions on the revival of these services, Facebook finally gives an official reason for its six-hour long global outage. Now, there were numerous conspiracy theories on Facebook getting hacked, the latest one included China’s involvement in the cyberattack. It is not something we could have expected but deep down, we know that it is possible. Anyhow, that is absolutely not the reason for this global outage as Facebook confirms, it was kind of their fault.
Facebook Inc. recently made some configuration change to its routers which fired back and resulted in a global outage. No, it was not a hack and user data was in no danger, whatsoever. As mentioned in a report by The Verge, we could explain the situation, something like Facebook’s internal machines were unable to communicate with each other and because of this disruption to the network traffic, it had a cascading effect on the way that Facebook Inc.’s data centers stay connected to each other. Thus, resulting in a total failure of all Facebook Inc. systems which included Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and more.
Facebook left no stone unturned when it came to apologizing. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg says, “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
The reports further mention that the issue initially began with the routine BGP update on Facebook systems that went wrong this time, wiping out the company’s DNS routing information that the company needs in order to allow other networks to find Facebook and other platforms on the Internet. Instagram and WhatsApp faced the same issue as they all went down together.
Anyhow, the situation is back to normal and Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and all of its services are up and running again after six hours. What did people do for six hours? Well, made memes about the situation, flocked to Twitter in perfect rhythm, and made alternatives like LinkedIn trending on Twitter followed by Signal and Telegram.
What did you do think of this global outage? What did you do in your free time, do let us know in the comments below?
