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Why Are Facebook and Instagram Down?
On Tuesday afternoon, the question arose of why are Facebook and Instagram down. A CloudFlare report noted “a large number of BGP withdrawals” to Facebook’s autonomous systems. The problem appeared to be affecting users’ ability to login to Facebook. Security teams scrambled to get service back up and running. The outage was considered a ‘high risk’ for people, assets, and reputation. Facebook decided to dispatch a small team to its Santa Clara data center and try to manually reset the servers. In one employee’s account, the outage was the “equivalent of a snow day.”
CloudFlare detected “a large number of BGP withdrawals” to Facebook’s autonomous systems
A recent update to Facebook‘s autonomous systems cut off some of the company’s servers from the map, causing the website to go offline for nearly six hours. The BGP protocol is crucial for Autonomous Systems to communicate with each other. Cloudflare reported that it saw a large number of BGP withdrawals to Facebook’s autonomous systems, but the outage was not immediately apparent. According to Cloudflare’s CTO, “BGP updates were mostly route withdrawals or erasing lines from the map pointing to Facebook.” Fastly’s tech lead said that Facebook had stopped providing his service, and KrebsOnSecurity confirmed the outage.
According to a post by a Facebook engineer, the social network’s internal system went offline in October. Because of the outage, the company’s security system was down. Employees couldn’t login, and their accounts were shut down. See the article : How to Delete Pictures on Facebook. As a result, the social networking giant lost millions of users. Cloudflare’s engineers have not yet found any proof that Facebook’s user data was compromised.
Oculus
Facebook and Instagram were down for six hours on Monday, October 4. The social network, along with its subsidiaries WhatsApp and Messenger, had a server error. Users could not send messages or load new content in the mobile apps. Read also : How to Lock Your Facebook Account. The cause of the outage is still unclear, but it’s likely related to Oculus, the virtual reality platform. Facebook is also experiencing problems with its Workplace business communication platform. Whether it’s related to Oculus or not, users may want to take a moment to think about the situation before they use their social media networks.
It isn’t clear what caused the outage, but many people are reporting issues with the Oculus Quest headset. Facebook, which owns the Oculus division, has not provided an explanation for the outage. Facebook is a leading social media platform, so it makes sense that this outage would affect the social media sites. The outage is likely related to Facebook’s outage.
Facebook login believed to be affected
A new hack has left Facebook users worried, but the social network insists it isn’t at fault. The outage, which affected about 40 million people, has been attributed to a bug that allowed hackers to steal access tokens. These tokens are used to stay logged in to Facebook without having to re-enter their passwords. Read also : How Do I Tag Someone on Facebook?. Hackers were able to use this information to manipulate other accounts. Facebook has reset access tokens for almost 50 million users who used the “View As” feature in the past year, but did not reveal whether the hack affected national security agencies.
The attackers used Facebook’s API system to access people’s accounts. The access tokens would allow attackers to log in as the user and access their accounts on other websites and apps. In addition to Facebook, these attackers could also use Facebook Login to log into third-party apps and sites. This new attack puts Facebook in a difficult position, especially after the company faced mounting criticism and privacy issues in recent years.
Security team scrambled to restore service
A global outage of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp has affected users worldwide. The company scrambled to restore service as quickly as possible, but the delay left some users without access to the services. The outage began around noon Eastern time and has continued for more than four hours. The problem has not been identified by Facebook, but cybersecurity experts have suggested it could have been an internal issue. The social networking company issued an apology to its users and said it would take a couple of days to fully restore service.
The outage was deemed a MODERATE risk to people, assets, and reputation. In response, the company sent a small team to its Santa Clara data center to manually reset servers. Some employees described the outage as “a snow day” for the company. The company is still investigating how the outage occurred, but a full restoration of service is unlikely for now. In the meantime, users were advised to try a different browser.
