technical explanations and suspicions of cyberattack

>> Read more: Former Facebook employee accuses the company

To integrate

At the technical levelSystems analyst Doug Madory said the Domain Name System (DNS for its acronym in English) that tells browsers how loading properties from Facebook or other sites was not available. DNS channels have been “removed”. DNS is a fundamental building block for accessing Internet traffic. DNS translates an address such as “facebook.com” into an IP address made up of numbers (for example, 123.45.67.890). If Facebook’s DNS records go missing, no one can find them. A programmer, @Phineyes, said that “it looks like Authorized DNS, that is, the way domains resolve their IP addresses, have been removed “, so that “there is no immediate way for routers to access servers for IP addresses from Facebook”.

An interpretation which also coincides with that proposed Dane Knecht, Senior Vice President of Cloudflare. Cloudflare is one of the largest companies on the internet and is responsible for providing a variety of services related to computer security, servers and content delivery networks. On Twitter, Knecht noted that “Facebook’s DNS and other services are down and their routes have been taken off the Internet.”

DNS and BGP

The technical director of Transparent on-board services, Diego Suárez, added that “Without these records, browsers and applications cannot find the servers that deliver social media content”, explained to the press. “DNS is the consequence and not the cause, since the problem is even deeper: BGP routing ”, said Diego Suárez. “BGP is the Internet’s postal system. It is a protocol by which routers from Internet providers know how to send network packets.” graphic.

a Facebook spokesperson in Argentina He confirmed that they “were having problems” but were “working” to normalize them. Around 12:15 p.m. Argentina time, all three Facebook-owned apps stopped working and, according to the specialized portal “Downdetector.com.ar”, to less than an hour added over 20,100 general user complaints. The causes of the overall failure were not immediately clarified by Mark Zuckerberg’s company.

>> Read more: WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook recover from biggest drop in history

According to Downdetector data, WhatsApp has accumulated 8,567 messages from local users denouncing the fall of the service, of which 39% reported problems sending messages, 32% in the app and 29% on the social network site. As for Instagram, they registered 3,763 reports malfunctions, of which 35% reported website outages, 33% bad server connections, and 32% application problems. Ultimately3,507 local users reported issues with the Facebook app, specifically with the website, 68%.

Yes OK WhatsApp and Instagram had suffered a drop in March and July this year, the last time faults were recorded in all three services simultaneously was in July 2020, according to the Adsl Zone portal. This Monday, globally, Downdetector reviewed more than 5.6 million reports of issues with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp as of 11:15 a.m. EST in the United States.

However, the biggest drop in WhatsApp history was recorded on March 13 and 14, 2019, that he has lasted 14 hours and also affected the other three Facebook apps. Despite the fact that at the time the first hypotheses on the cause of the fall indicated “a cyberattack carried out by hackers from all over the world”, quick the company reported that it was “a technical failure in the configuration of its servers”, according to the specialist portal Andina Link.

>> Read more: Facebook suffered the biggest leak in history: it affects 1,500 million users

In 2019, Facebook had 2.3 billion users, WhatsApp over 1.5 billion, and Instagram about 1 billion. Currently, according to the Statista site, Facebook has accumulated more than 2.7 billion and 1.3 billion on Facebook Messenger, Instagram has added about 200 million more, while WhatsApp has reached 2 billion active users.

On Twitter, the social network to which users “return” when others fail, complaints have arisen about the “poor quality” of the service., many of which They also encouraged the replacement of WhatsApp by Telegram, a messaging application which already has 500 million active users and which “has hardly seen a decline in recent years,” he explained. Adsl Zone, although this Monday it collapsed, but apparently due to excess demand.