General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFacebook, WhatsApp, Instagram deplatform themselves: It was apparently a BGP screw up
Facebook and its other social media sites, WhatsApp and Instagram, fell offline today.
The outage started around 1100 ET (1700 UTC) for Facebook and Instagram, and shortly after that WhatsApp.
Dane Knecht, senior vice president at Cloudflare, tweeted that the outage was attributed to Facebook's BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routes being withdrawn on the internet. That broke or hampered connectivity between the wider world and Facebook's systems, including its DNS servers. As such, we can't even resolve facebook.com right now.
You can see Facebook's withdrawal of routes to the internet in the visualization below. Earlier this year, the technology giant spoke of building an automated system for configuring its peering configuration. It is likely a BGP configuration change somewhere backfired and will take time to recover from.
Link to tweet
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/04/facebook_sites_outage/
BigmanPigman
(51,430 posts)Quel dommage
Takket
(21,424 posts)The old network troubleshooting saying is, when anything goes wrong, "It's DNS." This time Domain Name Server (DNS) appears to be the symptom of the root cause of the Facebook global failure. The true cause is that there are no working Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes into Facebook's sites.
BGP is the standardized exterior gateway protocol used to exchange routing and reachability information between the internet top-level autonomous systems (AS). Most people, indeed most network administrators, never need to deal with BGP.
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As annoying as this is to you, it may be even more annoying to Facebook employees. There are reports that Facebook employees can't enter their buildings because their "smart" badges and doors were also disabled by this network failure. If true, Facebook's people literally can't enter the building to fix things.
Klaralven
(7,510 posts)Add to this the security system that controls access to the building needed depends on their LDAP servers, which are inaccessible, so they have also locked themselves out physically.
Internal Comms are down because the corporate comms solution is FB Messenger and WhatsApp so no-one can talk to anyone else easily to come up with a solution.
This could take a while.
Klaralven
(7,510 posts)Response to Klaralven (Original post)
Chin music This message was self-deleted by its author.