Facebook is back after six-hour outage that lost $ 6 billion
Facebook is back online after a six-hour outage due to DNS routing issues. The blackout also affected Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and Oculus VR. For some, these services are back online now; however, after a DNS problem like this it can take hours for everything to work properly on each network. This is the biggest outage for Facebook since an incident in 2019 took its site offline for more than 24 hours. At the same time, the global Facebook blackout shrank Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune by $ 5.9 billion (5 billion euros). The 37-year-old businessman has slipped from fifth to sixth on the list of richest people in the world.
The outage started yesterday, just before 6 p.m. (French time) and the sites started operating again around midnight. The outage lasted for at least 5 hours, which is a record in the history of the contemporary global internet during the GAFAM era. Brian Krebs, a cybercrime reporter, attributes this to a major DNS problem. He quotes a source who told him the incident was not of malicious origin. Instead, he claims it started with a routine BGP update gone awry, erasing the DNS routing information Facebook needs so other networks can find its sites. Krebs explains that the DNS records that tell systems how to find Facebook and Instagram “were pulled from global routing cables this morning.” At this point, however, it’s unclear exactly how this happened.
Krebs writes in a blog post:
“Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from continuous and global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and the like. Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.
In simpler terms, this morning Facebook removed the map telling computers around the world how to find its various properties online. Therefore, when someone types Facebook.com into a web browser, the web browser does not know where to find Facebook.com and returns an error page ”.
The Domain Name System, commonly abbreviated DNS, which can be translated as “domain name system”, is the distributed computer service used to translate Internet domain names into IP addresses or other records. The problem runs deeper than Facebook’s obvious DNS failures, however. Instagram, owned by Facebook, was also down, and its DNS services (which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook’s network) were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were accessible, but displayed HTTP 503 failures (no server available for the request), indicating that if DNS was working and service load balancers were accessible, application servers that should powering the load balancers were not.
A little later, Dane Knecht, vice president of Cloudflare, reported that all Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes for Facebook had been removed. Border Gateway Protocol is an external route exchange protocol, used in particular on the Internet network. Its main objective is to exchange routing and network accessibility information between Autonomous Systems. In other words, it is the system by which one network determines the best route to another network). With no BGP routes to Facebook’s network, Facebook’s DNS servers are unreachable, as are the missing app servers for Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR, which are owned by Facebook. If the BGP routes for a given network are missing or incorrect, no one outside that network can find it.
Facebook’s internal site is also affected
Facebook’s internal Workplace site and associated employee services are also affected by an outage today, according to technical blogger Jane Manchun Wong. The company issued a memo to employees about these issues. The New York Times reports that virtually everything inside Facebook is down, including the ability to use key cards to enter buildings, security systems, an internal calendar, and tools. planning, and more.
Global Facebook blackout loses $ 6 billion for Mark Zuckerberg
This massive Facebook outage caused Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune to shrink by $ 5.9 billion (5 billion euros), according to Forbes magazine. The 37-year-old businessman has slipped from fifth to sixth on the list of world’s richest people. The Facebook outage, which has affected millions of users around the world, has rocked the pillars of the world. New York stock market. Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune fell to $ 121.6 billion because of the fall in his shares, a Bloomberg tally says. Its losses have reached 15 billion since mid-September.
Facebook is accumulating setbacks between accusations of group policy and a major failure affecting access to its networks and messaging services for several million of its users. Since its peaks in early September, the stock has lost 15%. The social network is initially the object of the accusations of a whistleblower who will testify in front of the Congress today to affirm that Facebook chooses “the profit rather than the safety”.
Source: Cloudflare, krebsonsecurity
