Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, highlighting the world’s dependency on Facebook-owned networks.
Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, apologized for the outage in a blog post, saying that “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic across our data centers caused difficulties that disrupted this communication.”
The problem, according to cyber experts, boils down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Patrol, which is the mechanism that the internet uses to choose the fastest path for moving packets of data around.
Facebook’s technological infrastructure, according to experts, is unusually reliant on its systems, which proved catastrophic on Monday.
Following the disastrous routing modification, Facebook’s engineers were locked out of the mechanism that would allow them to convey that the update had been a mistake. As a result, they were unable to resolve the issue.
