Major Meta Social Platforms Down: Meta Browsing on Hold

Credit: Pixabay (Edited)

What happens when social platforms that are used by billions of people across the globe go down for a while?

This is the very thing that happened on the 4th of October 2021 when the major social platforms (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram & WhatsApp) went down and became inaccessible globally for approximately 5 to 6 hours where even anyone who tried using the “Log in with Facebook” could not access third-party application sites. As for WhatsApp, it was accessible but not possible to send messages or load new messages. In the time when the applications were down, people resulted to communicating using the alternative applications like Twitter, Telegram and more.

CAUSE OF THE OUTAGE

The Facebook engineering team on the 5th of October 2021, wrote and posted a blog article explaining the cause of the social platforms outage where during their usual maintenance routine, there was need for evaluating the global keystone susceptibility and a command that was run to do so, unfortunately disconnected the whole of Facebook’s data centers resulting to Facebook and its subsidiaries outage. Facebook’s DNS servers usually run on a detached communication system and are designed to draw back their Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes if they cannot connect to the data centers hence after a significant number of BGP updates that included draw back of routes to the IP prefixes and their authoritative name-servers, it was unachievable to connect to Facebook from the internet. In the process of uncovering a resolution, the Facebook team got access to the server computers at the Santa Clara, California data center, had them reset and bit by bit Facebook and its subsidiaries were up again and accessible to the users.

IMPACT OF THE OUTAGE

In the developing world where people depended on Facebook’s Free Basics program, the outage had a very major consequence that stage-struck business enterprises, human-centered work and communication. According to a blog article by The New York Times some of the employees coming back to their workplaces did not manage to go into the building and various rooms because their digital badges were also affected and stopped working. As for the security engineers, the consequence was more hard-boiled because it hampered them from evaluating the outage since they could not get access to the server area.

The site (Downdetector.com) which monitors and displays network breakdown, managed to record over 10 million trouble reports (the greatest figure for an incident up to date). The outage also managed to slow the Google Public DNS service making its users experience slowdowns. It is estimated that during the same day of the outage, shares in the company dropped by about 5% making its CEO (Mark Zuckerberg) wealth fall by more than 6 billion dollars and generally losing at least 60 million in advertising revenue.

Traffic volume for Facebook services during October 4, 2021 global outage. (Credit: wikipedia)

META’S RESPONSE TO THE OUTAGE

Hours later after its applications began being accessible again, the company in a tweet apologized for the outage as seen from the screenshots below;