#Facebook# simplified explanation of what happened yesterday
The major outage, which affected hundreds of millions, on Monday, and impeded access to the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms for more than 6 hours, raised several questions about what exactly happened and led to this exceptional problem, amid several speculations, some of them adopting the "famous conspiracy theory".
The malfunction occurred at a precise time, coinciding with leaks that put Facebook at the center of the accusations again, as a former content official for the giant company revealed what she described as violations that fuel divisions and harm children and urgently need regulation.
But Facebook offered an urgent apology to everyone affected by the group’s outage, while the company’s Vice President of Infrastructure, Santosh Janardan, determined that “changes in the settings with the primary routers that coordinate network traffic between data centers, caused problems that led to this being cut.” Connection".
what does that mean?
Cybersecurity experts believe the problem boils down to something called BGP, or Inter- Gateway Routing Protocol, the system the Internet uses to choose the fastest route to transmit packets of information.
Sami Selim of the data center company Telehouse compared BGP to Air Traffic Control.
He explained that in the same way that air traffic controllers sometimes make changes to flight schedules, "Facebook has updated these routes," according to what he was quoted by "AFP".
But this update contained a fundamental error, and it is not yet clear how exactly it happened and why? But Facebook's routers sent a message to the Internet that the company's servers no longer existed.
While experts assert that Facebook's technical infrastructure is extraordinarily dependent on its own systems, this has turned out to be "disastrous".
After Facebook sent the routers update, its engineers were taken out of the system that allows them to report that the update was, in fact, a bug. So they couldn't solve the problem.
"Usually it is very useful not to put all your eggs in one basket," said Pierre Bony of Avnec, the association that manages domain names in France.
"For security reasons, Facebook had to focus heavily on its infrastructure," he added.
"It simplifies things on a daily basis, but because everything is in the same place, when there is a problem in that place, it is impossible to do anything."
An indirect effect of the malfunction was that some Facebook employees were unable to enter their buildings because their security badges no longer worked, further slowing the response.
According to AFP, social media outages are not uncommon: Instagram alone experienced more than 80 outages last year in the United States, according to Tolster.com.
But the outage Facebook faced this week is rare in terms of its duration and impact.
There is also precedent for BGB being the root cause of a social network crash.
In 2008, when a Pakistani ISP was trying to block YouTube for local users, it inadvertently shut down the global site for hours.
And between Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, “billions of users were affected,” according to “Downdetector.”
And Facebook, whose shares fell about five percent due to the service outage, confirmed that "there is no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this failure."
But even though it only lasted a few hours, the impact of the outage was significant. Facebook's services are vital to many companies around the world, and users have complained of being cut off from their livelihoods.
Also, Facebook accounts are commonly used to log into other sites that have encountered additional problems due to the company's technical failure.
Meanwhile, rival instant messaging services reported that they had taken advantage of the outage that brought WhatsApp and Messenger to a halt.
The Telegram application moved from the 56th most downloaded free application in the United States to the 5th place within one day, according to the specialized company Sensor Tower.
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