Several hours without being able to use Facebook and Messenger chat, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus Vr services. A international blackout far-reaching certainly not unpublished but certainly, as the hours go by, among the most serious ever occurred at the platforms controlled by the colossus of Menlo Park. But what were the reasons of this void into which hundreds of millions of users have sunk?
As has happened on other occasions, the problem seems to concern the Facebook DNS, i.e. the association services between the web address of a page in natural language (for example facebook.
com) and the corresponding alphanumeric string that constitutes the URL of each single page on the web and identifies it. A key element that, as Cloudflare’s Dane Knecht explained, also affects BGP, that is the Border Gateway Protocol, the system that routes web traffic on its platforms in the most effective and rapid way. Imagine a highway full of signs with well-written exits but without the toll booths to pass through. And maybe the traffic police on strike. Or, as explained by John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, “it was the equivalent of remove users’ phone numbers from their directory names, making it impossible to call oneself ».
The problem has also affected Facebook’s parallel services such as Workplace, the sister platform reserved for both internal employees and thousands of organizations around the world, and the group’s internal sites. Facebook and the other sites of the company, during the blackout hours, have essentially disappeared from the web (there are even those who have identified the facebook.com domain for sale on auction sites).
During the Italian evening Facebook Cto Mike Schroepfer also intervened (on Twitter, and where else?) apologizing to all those affected by the disruption of Facebook services, while also providing further information on the problems: “We are facing network problems and the teams are working as quickly as possible to resolve and restart as soon as possible,” he wrote. Yet, according to the New York Times, even the technicians and experts called to intervene in the Santa Clara data center would have had problems, for example to open the doors, since their badges did not work (why? same servers went haywire).
Several DNS verification services, in fact, for hours have not returned results by entering the domains of Facebook, Instagram and other platforms: the servers that manage the mapping between names and numbers have not worked on a global scale, therefore the endless web of Menlo Park appeared unreachable for a long time and so it also appeared late in the Italian night, according to the website DownDetector: those strings did not convert to any IP. Only starting at midnight, slowly, the platforms are back to work: in fits and starts, not for everyone and for all apps, but restoring a situation that is ever closer to normal.
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