Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all closed for six hours on Monday, October 4, rendering the services of the world’s largest social media network on which billions of people depended cannot be used.
According to Facebook, the outage was caused by a misconfiguration of the company's router. However, experts associate the outage with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) problem.
What is the BGP protocol?
Autonomous systems, such as the Internet, are networks of networks. To transfer data from these huge networks to the rest of the Internet, border gateway protocols are used. It is basically a means for these independent devices to communicate and exchange routing information.
According to "The Verge", BGP is a set of maps shared by autonomous systems. As described by The Verge, think of BGP as a group of individuals who are constantly developing and updating maps that show you how to access popular websites such as YouTube and Facebook. Just like the Internet, these so-called maps may change at any time.
So, what caused Facebook's interruption?
According to media reports, sources within Facebook and Internet traffic experts attribute the global Facebook outage to BGP issues.
This is all because of an error in one of Facebook's backbone routers, which produced a cascading effect, which eventually led to the paralysis of the entire network.
According to Cloudflare researchers, when Facebook stopped advertising routes, Cloudflare's DNS servers went offline. According to the Cloudflare blog, Facebook and its website have basically been removed from the Internet due to these withdrawals.
Will Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp keep your data safe?
According to a blog post by Facebook, its engineers have identified incorrect configuration updates as the source of the problem, and there is no evidence that user data was stolen due to the interruption.
According to experts, there is no indication of foul play or hacking, which could cause Facebook's system to crash on Monday.
This interruption is most likely caused by incorrect configuration changes, and we now hope to make this public. "Due to this outage, we have no indication that user data has been leaked," Facebook wrote in a blog post.
What are the consequences?
Statistics show that, as of today, more than 2.8 billion people use Facebook’s "Giant Blue" social network, 2 billion people use WhatsApp, and 1 billion people use Instagram.
Some of these apps have the highest user bases in India: Facebook has 410 million Indian users, WhatsApp has 530 million Indian users, and Instagram has 210 Indian users. Facebook's services are critical to many local companies, so any downtime is bad news. India has services such as Meesho, and merchants rely heavily on communication through platforms such as WhatsApp, which is why Facebook invested in the company.