Regulators, providers and experts analyze the causes of the massive crash of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which affected 2.7 billion people yesterday. Some sources speak of up to 3.5 billion people affected.
According to the information published by the company itself and some deductions, such as that made by Cisco, the incident was caused by the exit of BGP or Border Gateway Protocol routes, and that this could have been due to human error. The industry was surprised by the lack of redundancy in connectivity that the event highlighted, in addition to the absence of alternative routes to the drop of BGP routes.
An emailed statement from Cisco ThousandEyes noted: "While DNS failures may have caused applications to get disconnected, Facebook's large-scale BGP route withdrawals that caused the incident, along with other signs, point to the possibility that the problem has affected Facebook more extensively". Meanwhile, it is known that Facebook's servers did not stop working.
Facebook assured that the data of the apps' users maintain security and were not violated. The company added that it "had no evidence that user data were compromised as a result of this downtime", adding that it was working to understand what had happened to make its infrastructure to be "more resilient" in the future.
The loss of Facebook turned into a gain for other social networks. The Twitter Inc. network stayed online and CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted his support to Signal, another messenger pp, as a WhatsApp alternative. Signal recorded millions of new users yesterday, while Telegram, whose functionality closely mirrors that of WhatsApp, climbed 55 positions to top the list of US iPhone downloads, according to Sensor Tower.
Complaint. The global outage came less than 24 hours after the US news program 60 Minutes revealed the identity of whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has released an internal Facebook investigation related to the alleged amplification of the political unrest in the platform, and the negative impacts that Instagram can have on the self-esteem of adolescents.
Facebook has experienced major outages in the past, once in 2019 and once in 2008, although not on this scale. Additionally, Facebook admitted last year that its software development kit caused several iOS apps to malfunction.
Tools. Facebook's internal tools and communication systems were affected by the outage, adding to the challenge for engineers working to identify and resolve the issue. Its internal work product, Workplace, was also affected. A company spokesperson quoted by Bloomberg said that solving the underlying problem involved going into a physical server installation and manually resetting some servers.
"Sorry, to all the small and large businesses, families and individuals who depend on us", Mike Schroepfer, the office's chief technology officer, tweeted on Monday afternoon. His apology was reiterated by Facebook's engineering blog.
The downfall of these apps serves to dramatically illustrate modern society's over-reliance on a few unaccountable American tech giants. What if a similar event happened on Amazon, Google, or some other hyper-scaler on which the digital world is based? One day the entire digital world will be paralyzed by an event like this. Better protections need to be in place to prevent that from happening.