Facebook's Prolonged Network Outage Not Caused by Hackers
On Monday, October 4, Facebook and the entire network of connected applications and platforms that Facebook owns and runs suffered a service outage. Even though many were quick to jump the gun and blame the problem on a hacker attack, the real cause of the issue turned out to be much more mundane.
Facebook's entire connected digital empire of applications and services, including the Facebook platform itself, WhatsApp, Instagram as well as Oculus VR went down on Monday and remained inaccessible for roughly six hours - no short period, considering the breadth of platforms affected and the regular use they enjoy each day.
The outage started just before noon Eastern Time, concurrent with the domain name servers becoming inaccessible. Security analysis suspected a DNS problem as soon as the outage started. Of course, some online commenters were quick to leap to conclusions and suspected a hacker attack or a data breach, which is not the case here.
Facebook's VP of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, provided some official insight into the matter. The core of the issue was the border gateway protocol (BGP) and the DNS.
The full details provided by Janardhan explain that "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues". This initial interruption in data center coordination caused an avalanche effect and brought all Facebook-run services to a grind.
Facebook also made sure to make it abundantly clear that the disruption was not caused by a malicious actor attacking Facebook or by some other sort of criminal activity or data breach. Janardhan also stated that, at the bottom of everything, the trigger that caused this cascading outage, was very likely a bad configuration change. User credentials and associated information have not been impacted in any negative way.
The border gateway protocol that was also part of the issue is, in the simplest of terms, a tool that allows one network to communicate and advertise its presence, make itself discoverable to other networks. The outage in BGP effectively hid Facebook's presence from the rest of the world, causing the issue.