By Monday evening, Facebook’s various services had been totally inaccessible for more than seven hours. People couldn’t send apps or make video calls with Messenger. What we now know is that mistakes have happened with Facebook’s proprietary BGP protocol, but what exactly is that?
Facebook outage
For Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger users, the lights went out for more than seven hours around 5:30 p.m. on Monday. Popular services were completely down, and Facebook didn’t give the first signs of life until 12:00 midnight. WhatsApp followed an hour later, because then the first apps came in again.
It was a failure of a scale not seen before with Facebook’s services. Not only did all of Facebook’s social media go down, but according to The New York Times Employees also had limited access to the Facebook headquarters buildings and meeting rooms. That made matters even more difficult.
With such a long-lasting outage and without explanations from Facebook, all sorts of theories have been circulated about the exact cause, but several internet traffic experts were quick to point to an error with Facebook’s “BGP routing”. One of those experts was Dane Knecht, the vice president of Cloudflare, and internet services company.
What is BGP?
Only the term BGP is of course not ready knowledge for most of us, and a word of explanation is therefore certainly interesting. BGP stands for ‘Border Gateway Protocol’. The BGP is one of the important internet protocols that regulates internet traffic from your provider’s network to the servers of websites already Facebook.
As mentioned, there are several of those important protocols, but without BGP, the internet in principle does not function. BGP serves as a kind of traffic signpost that directs the other protocols. Well, the comparison with a signpost is very simplistic, because internet traffic and the determination of routes is many times more complex and more variable than, for example, car traffic.
But what is the relationship between the BGP and that other, more well-known network protocol, the DNS or Domain Name System? Isn’t the DNS called the address book of the internet? The DNS does indeed work similar to an address book, but with that protocol alone, the network does not find its way to the correct destination. The DNS is more like a friend telling you to go to Facebook, while the BGP is like a signpost to point you in the right direction along the way.
But what went wrong?
Facebook has according to The Verge his own BGP system, which Facebook gave a word about at the beginning of this year in a paper. It’s clear that the protocol that allows Facebook to work on servers went completely wrong on Monday, and the blame for that rests entirely with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s company.
from a statement of Facebook engineers found that a change in the configuration of the BGP caused the problems. A behind-the-scenes change caused a problem with the internal communications of Facebook’s data centers, causing the entire network infrastructure to fail. In other words: Facebook accidentally removed all its signposts worldwide in one fell swoop.
How did a solution come about?
Because it was an internal problem with Facebook’s servers, employees could no longer access the buildings and meeting rooms with their badges. In such circumstances, it was difficult for the company to get the right people with the necessary permissions to communicate with each other so that they could come to a solution.
In addition, the problem was of a very complex nature. To take our comparison again: Facebook had to ensure that the signposts were in the right place and that they were also clearly visible to everyone. As we all now know, it took hours for the websites to go back online. According to Facebook, no personal data of users has been leaked, and there has never been any danger around it.
How did you experience the outage? Has it caused any serious problems for you? Have you perhaps installed other messaging apps for your communication, or have you fallen back on texting for a while? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of this article.
Want to keep up to date with the latest news about Andorid phones? then download our android app and follow us on Telegram and Twitter. Also check out our new AW Community for an overview of the most popular AW members.
– Thanks for information from Androidworld.