Cyber security expert Pratama Persadha said that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down as a group, allegedly due to human error.
As a result of the downfall of Facebook and its subsidiaries, users of the service were in a state of confusion, in which this was the worst since a similar incident in 2019, when it was down for more than 24 hours. Meanwhile, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down yesterday for six hours.
Pratama explained that there might be an error in the DNS (Domain Name System), but what caused the DNS problem, of course, Facebook knew better.
"This DNS delivers a certain URL, in this case facebook.com, to a certain IP where Facebook is located. In this case, there is an authoritative DNS route that allows all internet networks to communicate with Facebook. This can also happen due to human error," he said. The chairman of the CISSReC cyber security research institute in his written statement, Wednesday (6/10/2021).
Pratama added that the possibility of a system error was quite serious. The proof, said Pratama, is that the system for internal communication on Facebook also went down.
"From Facebook's internal information, they also ended up using Outlook to communicate temporarily, because their internal communication system was also down. Even a number of Facebook employees were immediately sent to their data center, to deal with the problem," said Pratama.
According to him, the possibility of losing the authoritative DNS route on Facebook is getting stronger with improvements that must be made in the Facebook data center. This means that Facebook engineers also cannot access Facebook's systems from outside the data center, due to the absence of DNS.
"In 2019, at least four times Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram experienced disruptions simultaneously. According to Facebook's confession, some of the reasons were because there was a new system update on the digital service," said the man from Cepu, Central Java.
"However, the possibility of hacking also exists. If the root of the problem is in DNS, the cause could be a miss configuration by human error or because of hacking. Because it has been down many times, and if it is caused by a configuration error or human error, it seems impossible to keep repeating it, " he continued.
Encourage Applications by the Children of the Nation
Furthermore, Pratama added that we cannot continue to depend on foreign services. Instead, the government should make cyber application independence one of the main programs in the next few years.
"We need local social media applications, local email and local chat applications. It needs to be built in stages, because in the long term we really need it in the current era of big data. So that not all the potential of the digital economy is controlled by others, not to mention this is also related to national cyber defense, " added Primary.
He conveyed that the Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram services had a very far-reaching influence, not only as entertainment in cyberspace. Facebook, for example, has become stronger than a country with more than 2 billion users, and will even issue its own currency.
