TECH NEWS – After Facebook became unaccessible yesterday (together with Messenger, WhatsApp, and even the Oculus headsets were rendered useless…), Mark Zuckerberg’s team had to explain.
The Ethereum blockchain’s inventor was right about his fear of having centralized services because what we have experienced throughout yesterday proves that such an approach can have its downsides. Facebook confirmed it by not only having the social media site unavailable, but it also broke Messenger, Whatsapp, and even the Oculus headsets due to them requiring a Facebook account to work. The site had to communicate via Twitter…
And now, here’s Facebook’s official explanation: “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” The site added that user data wasn’t compromised, meaning no hacking or a cyberattack was likely involved in the outage.
We have to emphasize the size of the outage: we mentioned that it is a centralized service, meaning even their internal LAN/WAN network got knocked down, not to mention the internal tools and communication within Facebook, and since all the acquired companies were hooked into it, it explains why you couldn’t use Instagram. It’s not an issue that you can fix in mere moments, so no wonder it took several hours to restore everything into operational status.
The image below is from Twitter. It paints an even more of a WTF case: the employees who were supposed to investigate the size of the outage couldn’t even get into the building because they had no access to the doors due to their badges being non-functional. That’s an issue and a half.
Perhaps it should be a wake-up call for Mark Zuckerberg, who allegedly lost seven billion dollars yesterday, but since they are way too profit-oriented, nothing will change.
Also heard this. Facebook have lost their LAN/WAN due to networking woes so there are a ton of knock on impacts.
It’s basically a core network failure for them (which I’ve been through at other companies, not pretty, will take hours for recovery). https://t.co/jCQH2pfMjv
— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) October 4, 2021
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