There is also a precedent for BGP meddling being at the root of a social media shutdown. This week's Facebook outage was rare in its length and scale, however. Social media outages are not uncommon: Instagram alone has experienced more than 80 in the past year in the United States, according to website builder ToolTester.
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The knock-on effects of the shutdown included some Facebook employees being unable to even enter their buildings because their security badges no longer worked, further slowing the response. "That streamlines things on a daily basis - but because everything is in the same place, when that place has a problem, nothing works."
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"For security reasons, Facebook has had to very strongly concentrate its infrastructure," he said. "Normally it's good not to put all your eggs in one basket," said Pierre Bonis of AFNIC, the association that manages domain names in France.
Why is instagram facebook and whatsapp down update#
Why did it take so long to fix the problem?Įxperts say Facebook's technical infrastructure is unusually reliant on its own systems - and that proved disastrous on Monday.Īfter Facebook sent the fateful routing update, its engineers got locked out of the system that would allow them to communicate that the update had, in fact, been an error. It's not yet clear how or why, but Facebook's routers essentially sent a message to the internet announcing that the company's servers no longer existed.
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In the same way that air traffic controllers sometimes make changes to flight schedules, "Facebook did an update of these routes," Slim said.īut this update contained a crucial error. Sami Slim of data centre company Telehouse compared BGP to "the internet equivalent of air traffic control". In an apologetic blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, said that "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication".įacebook explained Tuesday the outage was "caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making."Ĭyber experts think the problem boils down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol - the system the internet uses to pick the quickest route to move packets of information around. PARIS: Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world's reliance on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant. "On a serious note, running an e-commerce business there's a reliance on social media platforms with posts scheduled well in advance and potential work to do to re-jig posts for the remainder of the week.What actually caused the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage? And that's just with my kids who seem to have defaulted to communicating via WhatsApp. Jez Lamb, founder of said: "Real face-to-face conversations, what a weird concept. Now I am going to put my phone down and enjoy some real life interactions with real people. "I was just in the process of putting a new product up and advertising it this evening. As an e-commerce business, my whole working life is dominated by all social media platforms. She said: "Normally I would appreciate a forced break from social media. Some e-commerce business owners have responded to the popular social media platforms being down.ĭanielle Dunn, who owns an online bath bomb business Divine Box, said her work is dominated by the platforms. Read a recap of how the evening unfolded in our blog below.Į-commerce business owners talk of reliance on social media Security experts speculated the problem came following network changes, with the cause still unconfirmed.
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Users were able to access Facebook and Instagram from late on Monday evening, but many still faced problems on WhatsApp. The platforms had confirmed on Twitter they were aware of issues and worked to resolve them after thousands of people reported outages shortly before 5pm on Monday. READ MORE: Government cannot 'wave magic wand' to fix supply chain issues says Rishi Sunak “We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Facebook has issued an apology for the outage which impacted the social media giant, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, for several hours late on Monday.įacebook Engineering said in a statement on Twitter: “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry.