WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook started to recover after being down for more than six hours. Facebook is now revealing the cause of the disruption that affects its billions of users.
Facebook's Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, in his blog, said that the failure of the three services was caused by a configuration change in the backbone router. But Janardhan did not provide a more detailed explanation.
"Our engineering team has learned that configuration changes to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers are causing problems that disrupt these communications," Janardhan said in his blog, as quoted by The Verge, Tuesday (5/10/2021).
"This disruption to network traffic has a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, thereby stopping our services."
Janardhan also said the disruption was not caused by hackers or attempts to retrieve user data. It also ensures that no user data is leaked during this disruption.
Before Facebook revealed the cause of this disruption, several security experts revealed their speculations. Cloudflare Senior Vice President Dane Knecht said Facebook's border gateway protocol (BGP) route was suddenly withdrawn from the internet.
BGP is tasked with helping the network choose the best path to deliver internet traffic. The issue is thought to have started when an error occurred during a regular BGP update, which then removed the DNS routing information Facebook needed to allow other networks to find its site.
When WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook services fell, the internal systems used by Facebook employees were also affected. As a result, they could not work and the team of technicians assigned to check for disturbances was in trouble.
Facebook then sent a team of engineers to one of their data centers in California to manually reset the company's servers. But this process is complicated because the employee's digital identity card is not working, so the technician team can't access the server area.
