Since the morning of this Monday, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have stopped working for users around the world. And other services, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s company, including Facebook Workplace and the Oculus website, were also reported to be down.
According to DownDetector (site that collects reports of failures in messaging platforms and social networks), the problems started around 10:44 a.m. Mexico City time, and tens of thousands of users reported connection problems.
It’s as if Facebook doesn’t exist on the internet
The exact cause of the services outage is unclear, but Dane Knecht, senior vice president at web security firm Cloudflare, said that the BGP – Border Gateway Protocol routes (protocols used by networks to deliver Internet traffic) – of Facebook have “withdrawn from the internet”.
In this regard, cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont wrote on Twitter: “This seems like a pretty epic misconfiguration, Facebook basically doesn’t exist on the internet right now. Even their authoritative nameserver ranges have been removed from BGP”.
In another post, Beaumont shared screenshots of the GoDaddy and DomainTools sites, dedicated to domain registration and web hosting, where the domain facebook.com was available for purchase; however, as of this writing, it is not listed as available, so we don’t know if it actually was at some point.
What’s more, shortly before Facebook platforms went down, entries for Facebook and Instagram were removed from the Domain Name System (DNS) you use. A DNS is, in a nutshell, an Internet directory.
Every time someone opens a link or an app, their device has to look up the DNS used by the service they are trying to access to find it and then connect to it. The main DNS providers are Google, Amazon, and CloudFare. It is not clear whether all the sites and services that have failed today use the same DNS or not.
Don’t stop reading: True drama: These are the worst WhatsApp crashes
The problem of having everything in one place
According to experts, Facebook’s big problem could be that all of its services run on an infrastructure of back end shared, creating a “single point of failure”, in which if one of the platforms has problems, it is very likely that it will affect the others as well.
In the view of Matthew Hodgson, Co-Founder and CEO of Element and Technical Co-Founder of Matrix: “The ongoing outage of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook (including Facebook Messenger and Facebook Workplace) highlights that global outages are one of the main disadvantages of a centralized system”.
For the expert, centralized applications – such as what happens when having a single back end for sites and apps that belong to Facebook – it means putting “all your eggs in one basket”, so decentralized systems are much more reliable as there is no single point of failure and they can withstand significant outages, in order to keep the sites and platforms online.
According to the Reuters news agency, security experts believe that the outage could have been caused by a configuration error, which could be the result of an internal error; although it would also be possible to consider sabotage by someone with inside information, while an external hack is considered less likely.
How much has Facebook lost from this drop?
NetBlocks, which tracks Internet disruptions and their impact, estimates that the fall of Facebook platforms this October 4 has already has cost the world economy more than $ 160 million (more than 3,300 million pesos), this in just one hour without these services.
While Facebook shares, which has almost 2 billion daily active users, fell 5.5% in trading Monday afternoon, making this his worst day in nearly a year.
The last major disruption to Facebook platforms was in June 2021, when users from the United States, Morocco, Mexico and Brazil reported that they could not connect; and on September 2, Instagram fell for 16 hours, affecting users in India, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Italy and the United States, among other countries.