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Facebook’s (FB) week turned from bad to worse on Monday when the social media giant’s apps went off around the world for about six hours. In an article written Monday afternoon, Facebook vice president of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan blamed the outage on a configuration error on the “core routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers and have caused problems which interrupted this communication “.
This mistake, Janardhan writes, has had a cascading effect on Facebook’s entire network, both inside and outside the company, wiping out its services worldwide. Because of this, employees were unable to resolve the issue remotely, forcing the company to send engineers to one of its data centers to perform a manual reset, according to a note obtained by the New York Times.
While the company doesn’t go into details on what exactly happened, reporter Brian Krebs, citing sources within Facebook, named the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as the culprit. BGP is basically the way Internet traffic is routed over the web. It automatically finds the best paths for your website requests to get to a site’s servers and back. Without it, there is no internet.
When Facebook’s BGP routes were cut, there was no way for it to communicate with the wider Internet, removing the company’s services from the web, wrote Cloudflare CTO Celso. Martinho, in a blog post.
Cloudflare works with the Internet’s Domain Name System or DNS, which turns website names like www.yahoofinance.com into the actual numeric address that computers read to take you to the right site. Because of this, Cloudflare got a glimpse of the BGP issues Facebook was facing in real time.
The outage, which began around 12 p.m. ET, shut down the company’s main Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus virtual reality apps. The collapse was so widespread that Facebook employees couldn’t communicate with each other using the company’s internal chat app, while others were unable to. open house on the Facebook campus.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been noticeably silent on the controversies surrounding the Journal and the “60 Minutes” reports, issued a two-sentence apology Monday evening saying the company’s apps were coming back online and that he knew “how much you rely on our services to stay in touch with the people you care about.
The company’s shares, meanwhile, were hit hard during the outage, falling nearly 5% on an already difficult day for the rest of the tech industry, with competitors such as Apple stocks, Amazon and Google falling between 1% and 2%.
The outage came a day after former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen appeared on “60 Minutes” to discuss a mine of internal documents she leaked to the news program and the Wall Street Journal.
Haugen is scheduled to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on consumer protection on Tuesday, where she will discuss the leaks. Last week, the subcommittee heard testimony from Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of security, who was grilled on charges that Facebook took a Big Tobacco page by hiding research that its products are harmful.
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