The world social networks fell “Biggest failure in 13 years”

“Biggest failure in 13 years.” How and why the world social networks fell

On October 4, the first reports of disruptions to Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook appeared in the news. The hopes of users that restricting access for a short time turned out to be far from reality, the partial work of social networks was restored only by one in the morning. Briefly about what is known about the largest Internet outage in the past few years, on the morning of October 5.

World social networks fell

It all started with Facebook services. Other applications began to crash behind them.

It all started with user complaints about Facebook and Instagram not working. After that, the WhatsApp messenger did not last long either. Users began to massively switch to Telegram – according to the team, due to the sudden influx of the service began to work slower than usual.

Over the next few hours, the Downdetector website recorded interruptions in the work of TikTok, Twitter, which kindly invited all those bored without their usual social networks to its platform, Snapchat, Tinder, Viber, Zoom. Netflix streaming service, Gmail, YouTube video hosting, Bank of America online service were affected. These ad hoc glitches were associated with a huge influx of users following the shutdown of Facebook. The most ironic “fall” of the day – problems in the work of the Downdetector service, which recorded calls about other failures around the world.

In a few hours, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg lost $ 6.6 billion. Employees of the corporation could not get into the offices to assess the scale of the problem and start solving on the spot: electronic passes were blocked. This failure became the most significant for Facebook since 2008 – then the social network remained unavailable for a day. At the same time, the number of users was several times less than in 2021 – now about three billion people are registered on the portal.

Technical error, internal sabotage or hacker attack?
Possible Causes of the Global Internet Crash

First of all, Facebook employees dismissed the hacker attack as the cause of the problem. At the same time, information appeared on the network about the sale on the Darknet of a database of 1.5 billion Facebook users, including phone numbers and emails.

According to the Associated Press, the crash could be due to issues with the DNS server settings. It is a domain name system that maps site domains of www.facebook.com to the IP addresses of the physical servers on which they are located, for example, 987.654.321. In fact, each transition to the page goes through such a “transcoding” procedure. DNS servers are located at different levels, such as local, regional, or country. On October 4, the Facebook-related DNS addresses are believed to have disappeared from global servers. Twitter has speculated that Facebook has been virtually erased from the Internet.

Reddit users speculated that a massive update of routers on Facebook, during which something went wrong, was to blame. Their fall could lead to a break in communication with the DNS servers, as well as between the internal services of the corporation. At the same time, five minutes before the outage began, the Cloudflare service recorded a large-scale update of the dynamic routing protocol, namely, the cancellation of routes. Twitter users are posting screenshots of the conversations that confirm this version.

In part, the work of Facebook services began to recover relatively recently. In terms of content, every minute of non-working Instagram costs the world sixty-five thousand photos, and in six hours of Facebook downtime, users could post 86 million photos.