Explained: Why Facebook, WhatsApp Instagram got down – Times of India

It may sound exaggerated, but some parts of the digital world are among the world’s largest social media Platforms fell. It was a global failure as users around the world could not access Facebook, WhatsApp, instagram for hours. There are billions of users logged in every day across all three platforms combined. So what was the reason behind the global outage? Here’s an explainer on a possible root cause of this:

What caused the Facebook platform to ‘crash’

Cybercrime experts and cyber security researchers have tried to find out the reasons for this. At its core, according to Brian Krebs, a cybercrime reporter, it was a BGP or Border Gateway Protocol issue.

What is Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)?

Simply put, it is the protocol that drives the Internet or makes it work. Since the Internet is a network of networks, BGP is the mechanism that binds it together. When BGP doesn’t work, internet routers really can’t figure out what to do and this can lead to internet not working. Routers – the bigger ones – keep updating other possible routes that are used to route network packets to the last possible source. In this case, the Facebook platform was the end point of destination and the BGP problem meant that Facebook was unable to tell other networks that it was on the Internet.

How does the Border Gateway Protocol work?

To borrow an analogy from The Verge, BGP is like an entity responsible for creating and more importantly updating maps that take you to sites like Google, Facebook or YouTube. So if someone is responsible for creating and updating the map, and they make a mistake, traffic – or users – will not reach that location.

How did the BGP issue affect Facebook?

According to Cloudflare researchers, “a BGP update message informs the router of any changes you make to the prefix ad or withdraw the prefix altogether.” Last night there were a lot of routing changes from Facebook and then the routes were taken back, Facebook’s DNS servers went offline. DNS is a domain name server and in case you are wondering what it is, here’s what it means.
As Cloudflare explains, “The Domain Name System (DNS) is the phonebook of the Internet.” People get information online through domain name – Timesofindia.com Or facebook.com. Internet browsers use IP or Internet Protocol addresses and what DNS does is that it translates domain names into IP addresses the browser can load Internet resources on.

What does Facebook have to say about the outage?

In an official blog post, Facebook said that “Our engineering teams have learned that this communication was interrupted due to a configuration change on the Backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers. There was a huge impact on the way. Data centers communicate, which stops our services.”

A faulty configuration change: This is what happened facebook down

Facebook clarified that this was not a hack or a cyber attack. “We would like to clarify at this time that we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime, The social media giant said in a blog post.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are now back and the company is “sorry for the disruption”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Said in a Facebook post that the platforms are slowly coming back. And Zuckerberg even apologized. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are now back online. Sorry for today’s disruption — I know how much you trust our services to stay connected to the people you care about,” he said.