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On Monday evening, the platforms were unavailable for more than five hours, and only around midnight the services slowly started working again.
Around six hours without Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram: An unusually long total outage affected billions of users of the online network on Monday. While Facebook did not initially comment on the causes of the disruption, experts tipped a configuration error in the network infrastructure that made all Facebook services inaccessible.
Founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized in a short Facebook post. Facebook’s technical team tweeted, “To the vast community of people and businesses around the world who rely on us: We’re sorry.”
Unreachable
It was not until around midnight (CET) that the group’s services slowly began to run again. It was explained to the “New York Times” that it should still take a few hours before all offers were available again in a stable manner.
Because parallel to this, disruptions were also reported at the domestic network providers, the suspicion was initially obvious that it could be a local problem. This was not the case: In Germany, the “Süddeutsche Zeitung,” among others, reported the outage. Services other than those of the Facebook group were accessible via local providers without any problems.
Internal error or sabotage?
Security experts now say the temporary outage could be the result of an internal error. But sabotage by an insider is also theoretically possible, they say. “Facebook locked its keys in the car,” tweeted expert Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
The glitch was so hard to get a handle on that Facebook had to send a team to its data center in Santa Clara, California, to attempt a “manual reset” of the servers, according to the New York Times. This would be similar to pressing the reset button on a PC at home because nothing works anymore.
Possible DNS malfunction
The causes of the problems were not initially known. An error message on the Facebook website mentioned a problem with the Domain Name System (DNS). Among other things, DNS ensures that website names typed in with letters are translated into IP addresses so that they can be accessed. According to some experts, the DNS entries of the Facebook services disappeared from the service that controls data traffic – making them invisible to the network infrastructure, so to speak.
The head of technology at cloud service provider Cloudflare, John Graham-Cumming, pointed out that users and also software were still trying to target Facebook services. This is causing a massive increase in the load on other DNS services, he wrote on Twitter.
Cyberattack rather excluded
DNS disruptions are a recurring occurrence. In July, for example, one of these caused numerous websites to be temporarily unavailable. At the time, it was triggered by problems at the web service provider Akamai. The centralization of the network infrastructure at large providers ensures that a failure at one company can take many services and websites offline at the same time.
Two unnamed IT security experts from Facebook told the New York Times that a cyberattack was unlikely to have triggered the problems. That’s because the technology behind the company’s individual apps is too different to take them all offline at the same time with a cyberattack. According to the newspaper, the internal communication system at Facebook also failed.
Problems also with access systems?
Meanwhile, reports are mounting that the outage at Facebook itself had tangible side effects that may have further complicated troubleshooting. For example, “New York Times” writer Sheera Frenkel wrote on Twitter that company employees told her they couldn’t get into the buildings at Facebook because the access systems stopped working. In turn, a colleague from NBC claimed that employees who were already in the building could no longer access conference rooms.
- source: derstandard.at/picture:pixabay.com
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