disabled person outage On Monday, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were hit by a problem with the company’s domain name system, a relatively unknown but important component of the Internet.
“Facebook and related properties disappeared from the Internet in a flurry of BGP updates,” said John Graham-Cumming, chief technology officer at Cloudflare.
Before understanding what BGP is and what it means, News18 tried to break down the problem in simple terms. Let’s start with the basics:
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What is DNS and what went wrong with it?
According to a Bloomberg report, DNS is like a phone book for the Internet. This is the tool that converts a web domain like Facebook.com into the actual Internet Protocol or IP address where the site resides. Think of Facebook.com as the person someone can see in white pages, and the IP address as the physical address they’ll find.
On Monday, a technical problem with Facebook’s DNS records led to the malfunction. When a DNS error occurs, which makes it impossible to change Facebook.com to the user’s profile page. Apparently this is what happened inside Facebook, but on a scale that temporarily paralyzed the entire Facebook ecosystem.
Not only were Facebook’s primary platforms down, but so were their internal applications, including the company’s own email system. Users on Twitter and Reddit also indicated that employees at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., campus were unable to access offices and conference rooms that required security badges. This can happen if the system providing access is also connected to the same domain, Facebook.com.
What is BGP now?
The same Bloomberg report also said that Facebook Inc’s problem originated in the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. If DNS is the phone book of the Internet, then BGP is its postal service. When a user enters data into the Internet, BGP determines the best available path that the data can travel.
In a tweet by John Graham-Cumming, Chief Technology Officer of Cloudflare Inc., minutes before Facebook’s platform loaded, public records show that a large number of changes were made to Facebook’s BGP routes.
While the BGP snafu may explain why Facebook’s DNS has failed, the company has yet to comment on why the BGP routes were withdrawn as early as October 4.
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