Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet
(10/04/2021; The Cloudflare Blog)
Facebook and its affiliated services WhatsApp and Instagram were, in fact, all down. Their DNS names stopped resolving, and their infrastructure IPs were unreachable. It was as if someone had "pulled the cables" from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.How's that even possible?
...
The Internet is literally a network of networks, and it’s bound together by BGP [Border Gateway Protocol]. BGP allows one network (say Facebook) to advertise its presence to other networks that form the Internet. As we write Facebook is not advertising its presence, ISPs and other networks can’t find Facebook’s network and so it is unavailable.
...At 1658 UTC we noticed that Facebook had stopped announcing the routes to their DNS prefixes. That meant that, at least, Facebook’s DNS servers were unavailable. Because of this Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver could no longer respond to queries asking for the IP address of facebook.com or instagram.com.
Read the rest from The Cloudflare Blog: Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet)
Hi there! How are you? I haven't read your posts for a long time, this topic is interesting.
And if it is something strange as I recently wrote in my post. This glitch had to be caused internally by a Facebook worker misconfiguring the main traffic router.
Hi! Yes, I've struggled to keep up with posting. I've saved a number of articles in my browser, so I might post some older stuff that I found interesting. Mostly, I like to post relatively recent articles.
I've read your post about what happened at Facebook. As far as I know, they have not revealed what actually happened, but I agree with your conclusions:
Nice assessment!
Thank you .. I have been surprised by the amounts of Meme that was published on Twitter and I began to investigate reading articles and reaching a conclusion of what really happened, of course these are mostly only assumptions of what I think happened.
Ciao @primevaldad, penso che ci sia qualcosa nascosto in tutto questo, o è che sono molto diffidente, qualcosa del genere non è normale, 7 ore senza un servizio di base al momento e dipendiamo già da questo, ma spero che lo faccia non succedere più
It's really interesting how much we depend on it, right?
It actually didn't affect me much, as I'm not active on those networks.
It did get me though! My login to chess.com and their app is through FB authorization. So I couldn't play my chess games on my phone! 🙂
Very interesting definitely it was a crash and i dont feel scare about facebook services but from now i will use most frequently serves as telegram
Of course, since the internet is a bundle of server-to-server connections relying on each other, the same outage could happen to other platforms.
Certainly, there are lessons here (mostly about DNS, I suppose). Perhaps 5__ errors should be re-engineered for various different responses depending on the severity of connection loss, or network protocol designers should develop backup systems that work in the event of a series of servers losing touch?
The key is the following "designers should develop backup systems"