Facebook has apologised after it stopped working for users around the world for several hours on Monday.
WhatsApp and Instagram – which are owned by the company – were also down
What was the problem?
In a nutshell, Facebook’s systems stopped talking to the wider internet.
It was as if “someone had pulled the cables from their data centres all at once and disconnected them from the internet”, explained web infrastructure firm Cloudflare.
Facebook’s explanation was a little more technical.
It said “configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication”. This had a “cascading effect… bringing our services to a halt”.
Zuckerberg apologises for six-hour Facebook outage
So why couldn’t people access Facebook?
The internet breaks down into hundreds of thousands of networks. Big firms like Facebook have their own larger networks – known as autonomous systems.
When you want to visit Facebook (or Instagram or WhatsApp), the back-end system that allows computers to connect with their network uses the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) – a kind of postal service for the internet.
In order to direct people to the websites they want to visit, BGP looks at all of the available paths that data could travel and picks the best route.
On Monday Facebook suddenly stopped providing the information the system needed to function.
It meant nobody’s computers had any way of connecting to Facebook or its other sites.
What effect did the outage have?
The failure of such key internet players had a knock-on effect on individuals and businesses across the globe.
Downdetector, which tracks outages, said some 10.6 million problems were reported around the world – the largest number ever recorded.
For many, losing access to Facebook’s services was just an inconvenience. But for some small businesses in the developing world without other reliable ways to communicate with customers, it may have been a serious problem.
Likewise, some organisations where staff are still working remotely after the pandemic, now rely on WhatsApp to keep colleagues in touch.
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