Here there be dragons.
Monday saw everything owned by Mark Zuckerberg knocked offline; this included Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus.
From what’s generally been found out, the whole thing happened due to a DNS mishap. Around 11:40 ET, the Domain Name System for these sites records became unavailable. See, if you visualize the internet as a series of tubes sending a letter, the DNS is the address. And if the address gets lost or separated from your letter, the letter goes nowhere. Except, it’s more like the address stops existing, instead. Your letter goes out into the void, and you never get a response. But it’s more complicated than that, even.
From Wired:
“Facebook’s outage appears to be caused by DNS; however that’s a just symptom of the problem,” says Troy Mursch, chief research officer of cyberthreat intelligence company Bad Packets. The fundamental issue, Mursch says—and other experts agree—is that Facebook has withdrawn the so-called Border Gateway Protocol route that contains the IP addresses of its DNS nameservers. If DNS is the internet’s phone book, BGP is its navigation system; it decides what route data takes as it travels the information superhighway.
To put it all in layman’s terms (and to once again steal a bit from Wired), these sites fell off the map. Here there be dragons, matey.
And, while Facebook did put out an apology to users later in the day, when things were back to normal, there wasn’t really an explanation of how it all happened.
To everyone who was affected by the outages on our platforms today: we’re sorry. We know billions of people and businesses around the world depend on our products and services to stay connected. We appreciate your patience as we come back online.
We may never know exactly what caused the outage. But once whatever SNAFU caused the outage is fixed, it’s probably not going to matter all that much.
Source: Wired
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