On Monday evening, Facebook faced a global outage, which made the social media platform unreachable for hours. Other Facebook services, including WhatsApp and Instagram, also crashed. What went wrong?
Monday around 17:45 the first reports came in allestoringen.nl, but soon tens of thousands of Dutch people reported having problems with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It turned out to be a worldwide problem: millions of users could no longer use Facebook and Instagram while it was also no longer possible to send and receive messages via WhatsApp.
How can such a thing happen?
It is assumed that interference on the internet is part of it, but this outage lasted a very long time. Users were only able to get back on Facebook six hours after the first outage reports.
Facebook explained in a statement that the outage was due to a configuration error. The systems responsible for data traffic between the different nodes of the Facebook network failed, making communication between the data centers of the social media platform no longer possible.
As a result, all systems came to a standstill, making Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp unreachable.
The problems had such far-reaching consequences that employees’ access passes also no longer worked, meaning they no longer had access to Facebook’s office buildings. Of course, this also did not help in assessing and solving the problems.
Security expert Brian Krebs states that the malfunction must have arisen within Facebook and therefore not outside it. It is still unclear whether or not the configuration error was initiated by malicious parties.
Sources within Facebook told Krebs that the outage is likely the result of errors during a routine update of Facebook’s own BGP protocol. This is one of the important internet protocols that controls internet traffic from your provider’s network to Facebook’s servers.
no attack
Cloudflare, an IT infrastructure provider, said the failure is unlikely to be related to a hacker attack. “The most likely explanation is that Facebook accidentally threw itself off the internet during a routine investigation,” Cloudflare told AP. Other analysts and experts also seem to believe that Facebook has not been the victim of an attack, but rather internal human error.
Facebook also confirms this. “We have no evidence that user data was out due to the outage,” the social media platform said.
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