Yesterday, 4 in October around half past five in the afternoon, panic broke out on social networks: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down. The company quickly responded by reporting the obvious. But… How did it happen? We explain it in today's article.
As we all know, The Internet is a network of networks of computers. An entity, in this case Facebook, announces to the rest of the networks that it is located at such an address. This exchange of information between routers spread around the world is carried out using the BGP protocol, abbreviations in English for Border Gateway Protocol (Border Gateway Protocol).
BGP is the mechanism used by large routers and is based on a series of lists, this way neighboring routers know where to direct the requested traffic through the network. Each of these nodes is called an AS (Autonomous System) and they are identified by a number, ASN (Autonomous System Number, In English). If one of these AS does not announce its address, it's as if it doesn't exist for the rest of the Internet.
Like this, according to Cloudflare, one of the intermediary services for directing traffic between users and servers, what happened yesterday afternoon was that these addresses related to Facebook stopped being announced to the rest of the nodes. It's like taking a map and erasing all the names.
An event like the one that has occurred in the last few hours reminds us that the Internet is very complex and that the failure of a small system can have repercussions around the world. At midnight on the day 5 of October, the service of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has begun to be restored.
Fountain: Cloudflare
Image: Pixabay