Why did Facebook find itself paralyzed for hours?

Facebook remains ambiguous regarding the origin of the outage that occurred on Monday for about seven hours. California company is satisfied to mention it Basic router configuration changes (Backbones) that coordinates Internet traffic between data centers.

Many cybersecurity professionals believe that the incident may be related to a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) maintenance issue. The latter makes it possible to create a viable access path between the computer and the Internet site.

Facebook has updated these tracksSo says Sami Selim of the data center operator Telehouse. however, I’ve combined a bad path, says Mr. Saleem, making Facebook and its affiliated platforms inaccessible to Internet users.

The domain name Facebook.com has disappeared from the web’s radars, and has even been found for sale for a few moments on some hosts’ websites.

Failed for several hours

It took nearly seven hours for the Facebook group sites and apps to return to normal.

The duration of inaccessibility is not the time it took Facebook to diagnose the problem, confirms Pierre Bonis, director general of the French Association for Internet Naming Cooperation (AFNIC), the association responsible for managing French domain names.

On the other hand, There are times of replication He adds that once the error is discovered. The new information should be collected by all brokers in the internet chain.

If occasional outages are frequently identified on social networks, and especially on Instagram, the scale of Monday’s paralysis is unprecedented.

Facebook is in the headlines

Is it a human error, a technical failure, or a malicious attempt? At this point, nothing is preferred over another.

Several people have pointed to the parallel between Monday’s power outage and the recent disclosure of a whistleblower about the toxic effects of Facebook and Instagram on the company, which embarrassed the group led by Mark Zuckerberg.

After sending the internal documents to The Wall Street JournalFrances Hogan, a former Facebook engineer, came face-to-face on US television on Sunday, accusing the company of choosing Profit, not security. She is scheduled to testify before the US Senate on Tuesday.

financial losses

In addition to not being able to reach billions of internet users around the world, Facebook was unable to display ads for several hours, which is its main source of income.

On Wall Street, the penalty was final: Facebook stock fell nearly 5% on Monday.

Forbes It is estimated that Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune shrank by US$5.9 billion ($7.4 billion Canadian) on Monday, dropping him from fifth to sixth in the list of the world’s richest people. It was Larry Ellison, co-founder of the software company Oracle, who rose to one position.

Failing to benefit competition

The misfortunes of the group were also a blessing for the competition.

Thus, the messaging service Telegram, rival WhatsApp, on Monday overtook the 56th to the fifth most downloaded free app in the United States, according to the specialist company SensorTower.

Signals are growing on Signal (hello everyone)He also posted on Twitter these other messages that are known to encrypt data.

Monday’s events show that even the internet’s mainstays are not immune to major disruptions.

This is proof that Too big to fail [trop gros pour faillir] Does not work in the field of information technologyNote m. Good.

Specialists also point out the limits of Facebook’s focus on its various services.

Over the past two years, Facebook has consolidated its ecosystem of disparate applications into one basic infrastructuresays Mike Proulx, vice president and director of research at Forrester Research and Consulting.

This approach allows the company to gain operational efficiencies and insulate itself from any potential dismantling by regulators, but it also puts Facebook at risk of focus., he adds.

[C’est] One danger creeps in—like the old Christmas string lights: if one goes out, the others go out.