Six hours without Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp: how it was

Approximately at 18: 40 Moscow time on Monday, October 4 , users began to massively report total interruptions in the work of Facebook-owned services – social networks Facebook and Instagram, the WhatsApp messenger and even the Oculus VR services. The panic was compounded by the fact that alternative platforms also began to experience disruption due to congestion caused by an unexpected influx of visitors.

theverge.com

theverge.com

DNS failures caused the “digital apocalypse”. In particular, even before the restoration of the services, there was evidence that records related to Facebook services were suddenly deleted from the global routing tables. Essentially, Facebook and everything related to it has been “removed from the Internet.” Just prior to the fall of the entire Facebook network, there was activity similar to a failed attempt to centrally update routers, according to Cloudflare. As a result, the connection between the Facebook servers was lost and service in the DNS system was suspended.

According to The New York Times journalist Ryan Mac, the problem was aggravated by the fact that not only ordinary users. For a long time, employees of the company could not use service tools, including the internal Workplace platform and other means of intra-corporate communication. In addition, employees had to be sent directly to data centers to correct the situation manually, but even here they faced problems – the publication reported that in addition to web service servers and internal tools, the electronic security system also failed, limiting the use of electronic passes.

As users began to switch to using alternative platforms, the load on them increased so much that Telegram, VKontakte, Twitter and “non-core »Services like Netflix, YouTube and even Tinder. Of course, they all just greeted the increased traffic, but turned out to be somewhat unprepared for it.

Of course, the current situation could not but affect the financial performance of Facebook. The head of the company lost more than $ 6 billion, the shares of Facebook itself fell significantly, and against the background of the general panic, the shares of other companies that were not directly connected with the Facebook group began to fall. Almost the entire IT sector was affected.

Only about 1: 00 Moscow time, that is, after almost 6 hours after the “fall”, Zuckerberg’s company was able to partially restore the serviceability. However, some problems continued to be observed locally after that – some users complained about the inability to put likes, slow systems and other minor troubles associated with the work of Facebook services. Although the company itself announced a full recovery.

Facebook stated that the cause of the failure was an erroneous change in the configuration of the routers. At the same time, the company denies a hacker attack or an attempt to get to user data. Mark Zuckerberg himself has publicly apologized for the incident. “ Sorry for today’s disruption – I know how much you rely on our services to keep in touch with the people you care about “- he said in his blog.

We also add that this situation has shown the vulnerability of the modern Internet to such global failures of such huge services. As soon as people lost access to their usual services, they began to look for alternatives. And everything would be fine if these alternatives were ready for a sharp influx of new users. But this is not the case, and therefore a failure in Facebook could lead to “crashes” of many other services. But fortunately this did not happen.

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