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One Simple Mistake That Caused Facebook to Go Down
A six-hour outage caused havoc across the Facebook network on Monday. While the cause is not clear, it may have been a router update. But it is worth considering the implications of the outage on the stock market. The outage didn’t appear to be caused by a hacker, but was simply a simple mistake. In addition, the website’s uptime was significantly impacted, causing some users to experience slow or non-functional pages.
Misconfiguration of routers caused outage
The reason for Facebook’s outage was misconfiguration of routers, and it was a long, six-hour snafu. The issue was caused by a routine BGP update, which went wrong and prevented remote users from reverting configuration changes. The outage also affected many other websites, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook wrote in a blog post that this occurred because of a misconfiguration of routers that connect its network to the rest of the internet.
The outage was so severe that Facebook’s customers were unable to log in. The problem was traced to a faulty configuration change on backbone routers. These routers are the main components that coordinate network traffic between Facebook’s data centers. The misconfiguration caused the outage, and the company’s systems and tools failed to detect the problem. The outage delayed Facebook’s launch of a controversial privacy policy, and many users were unable to log on to their accounts.
Simple mistake
One simple mistake that caused Facebook to go down could have been easily avoided. The social network runs everything through its own Facebook platform, so the fact that the office and communications systems are inaccessible for users is particularly troubling. Even the security systems at Facebook’s data centers were offline, preventing employees from physically accessing the servers. While Facebook’s engineers have since announced a solution, the outage shows the difficulties of a single point of failure.
The outage took place globally on Monday, and has now been restored. Facebook’s outage was the second worst in its history, coming in at 14 hours – a shorter outage occurred in 2008.
DDOS attack not to blame
The recent outage of Facebook may not have been due to a DDOS attack, but the outage of services such as DNS may have been the culprit. This issue took place during the hours of midnight and 2am Pacific time, when many internet service providers, including Facebook, are down. Because of this, many people may assume the outage was due to a different cause. However, this was not the case. A Facebook spokesman said that the outage was caused by an accidental BGP routing leak, which is a known vulnerability to DDOS attacks.
While some network security experts believe the outage was caused by a DDOS attack, they are not entirely convinced. In fact, they were unable to find any evidence to suggest that Facebook was under attack. According to Google, the outage was a result of a “nontrivial” disruption in the internet routing. And if the outage was caused by a DDOS attack, it is unlikely Facebook was the target of a DDOS attack.
Effects on stock market
As Facebook continues to lose market value, the company’s stock price is under pressure, especially with its user base stalling. The company’s one-day market value fell nearly 5%, wiping out tens of billions of dollars. With users flatlining, Facebook could fall victim to a change in investor sentiment, and its stock may not be the last to go down. So, what will happen now?
The tech giant’s pending downfall has created a public relations crisis for the social network. A whistleblower, Francis Haugen, claimed the company ignored questionable content in order to focus on profits instead of the welfare of its users. While Facebook disputes many of Haugen’s claims, it released troves of internal documents to multiple news outlets, including FOX Business. Because of the escalating controversy, Facebook’s stock fell almost 5% today, losing Zuckerberg $7 billion in the process.
