The knock-on effects of the shutdown included some Facebook employees being unable to even enter their buildings because their security badges no longer worked, further slowing the response. 'That streamlines things on a daily basis - but because everything is in the same place, when that place has a problem, nothing works.' 'For security reasons, Facebook has had to very strongly concentrate its infrastructure,' he said. 'Normally it's good not to put all your eggs in one basket,' said Pierre Bonis of AFNIC, the association that manages domain names in France. Why did it take so long to fix the problem?Įxperts say Facebook's technical infrastructure is unusually reliant on its own systems - and that proved disastrous on Monday.Īfter Facebook sent the fateful routing update, its engineers got locked out of the system that would allow them to communicate that the update had, in fact, been an error. It's not yet clear how or why, but Facebook's routers essentially sent a message to the internet announcing that the company's servers no longer existed. In the same way that air traffic controllers sometimes make changes to flight schedules, 'Facebook did an update of these routes,' Slim said.īut this update contained a crucial error. Sami Slim of data centre company Telehouse compared BGP to 'the internet equivalent of air traffic control'. In an apologetic blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, said that 'configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication'.įacebook explained Tuesday the outage was 'caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making.'Ĭyber experts think the problem boils down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol - the system the internet uses to pick the quickest route to move packets of information around.

PARIS: Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world's reliance on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant. What actually caused the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage?

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