Late last night, popular social media platform Facebook and all its subsidiaries, including WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, suffered a global outage that lasted nearly six hours. Here's what caused the outage. #facebookdown #WhatsappOutage
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Initial speculation suggested the issue was caused by a Domain Name System (DNS) issue. This is because the DNS is like the internet's phonebook. It links URLs and hostnames in your browser's address bar to the correct IP address where the website/webpage is hosted.
However, experts suggested that DNS is just the symptom and the underlying issue is Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing. The BGP routing system gives information the correct routes to take on the data superhighway.
Due to a misconfiguration, it appeared as though the BGP routes vanished, sending all the queries reaching Facebook services into a bottomless abyss. WIRED reported that the BGP misconfiguration appears to have started at Facebook's end, bringing all its services down.
Facebook's official statement said the issue was caused by "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers." This set off a chain reaction affecting how the data centers communicate, bringing services to a grinding halt.
The Facebook service outage last night took down all Facebook-owned platforms & services, including Facebook's internal webpages for employees (confirmed by tipster Jane Manchun Wong) & login services for third-party apps and platforms (confirmed by Pokémon GO developer Niantic).
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