Yesterday October 4, 2021, the whole world was deprived of the social networks Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram for a little over 7 hours. During this time, no one could send or receive text messages and there was general panic. If you want to know the causes of this outage, its consequences and Facebook's position regarding this situation, you are in the right place!
A look back at the evening marked by the gigantic breakdown of the American giant: Facebook
You undoubtedly witnessed the malfunction of the Facebook, Messenger WhatsApp and Instagram networks yesterday October 4 . It was indeed a major, unprecedented outage which deprived all those who are used to using its networks to communicate with their loved ones, sell their products or simply have fun. Finally, a solution was found to the problem since at midnight, everything was back to normal.
“ To the entire community of people and businesses around the world who rely on our services: we are sincerely sorry. After noticing the issue, we worked hard to restore access to our applications and services, and we are happy to announce that they are now accessible and functional. Thank you for your support and patience .” It was through this message published on Twitter that the group announced the resolution of the problem!
Although some errors were observed overnight, a test carried out this morning showed that the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram networks are working normally . However, the American giant is already under fire in the United States and for many people, this global bug constitutes an unpleasant setback. For information, if the outage was difficult to manage, it is because the Facebook team itself was faced with this problem in order to communicate, reassure people and easily resolve the problem.
What are the causes of this global outage?
On the evening of Monday October 4, 2021 when we tried to access Facebook on the web, we found ourselves faced with messages like: “ This site is inaccessible ” or “ Unable to find the IP address of the Facebook server .com ”. Things have evolved and the Facebook home page has gradually returned.
This outage affected a range of services linked to Facebook such as Messenger , WhatsApp and Instagram . Even Facebook's virtual reality platform, Oculus , didn't work. It was a real earthquake when we know that the number of people who use Facebook's network of applications every day exceeds the 2.7 billion .
reverse engineering specialist , it would indeed be a DNS problem, thus compromising Facebook's entire network of applications. Even employees of Mark Zuckerberg's firm did not have access to the services provided by the American giant.
What is it really about? Indeed, a DNS, also known as a Domain Name System represents a kind of directory which is used to establish a direct link between the IP address of a server and its public URL . Usually, fixing such a problem takes a lot of time.
Furthermore, it is possible to place an offer on the Uni Registry site to purchase domain names and even those of: facebook.com, instagram.com and whatsapp.com. Some think that it was one or more ill-intentioned individuals who forced the purchase (very likely). Others, on the other hand, would mention a problem linked to a hacking or piracy .
Notwithstanding all these ideas, it seems that this is a simple bug in the Uni Registry linked to the impossibility of joining the DNS.
You should also know that the disruption to Facebook's services occurred the day after the release of an interview given by a former Facebook employee. According to information, he leaked confidential documents about the company. Last Sunday, Frances Haugen (former Facebook employee) stressed to the American television channel CBS News that the company had favored “ growth rather than security ” for all the people who use its services.
Revelations that undoubtedly indicated that Facebook was going to fight back, but no one could expect a global outage . Faced with Frances Hauge's statements, Mark Zuckerberg's company explains that the comments were misleading, thus affirming that it was a biased interpretation of the data and that the latter neglected the positive research carried out by the company. A clear answer, but which leaves some questions when we know that the social network has suffered multiple criticisms and controversies including the confidentiality of all registered people.
Facebook's position in the face of this global outage of its application network
In its statement, Facebook said the bug was caused by minor issues related to a configuration change in its systems that coordinate network traffic between its data centers.
“ This disruption in network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, which resulted in the shutdown of our services ,” explains the American giant.
“ We believe the root cause of this bug was due to an incorrect configuration change ,” he added.
Facebook says it also claimed the outage affected internal operating systems, “ which made our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the issue difficult .”
Finally, the company confirmed that there was no evidence that user data was leaked.
Did the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram outage have any consequences?
Since some other services use Facebook as an identification system , they have side effects that prevent some people from logging into these associated services. For example, games like Pokémon Go use Facebook login and may not be available for any game. The same goes for networks such as Snapchat , TikTok and other Facebook-related applications.
Alternative services are also starting to feel the impact of the influx of new people. Due to high traffic, Telegram is currently experiencing a huge slowdown.
Some people have also reported that page loading quality on Netflix has deteriorated. On the side of Oculus , another Facebook service, the servers are also in great difficulty and many people have reported losing certain games. Hopefully they come back in the next few days.
