Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp-- all of them were inaccessible for nearly six hours on late Monday (India time). While panic-struck Indian users took to Twitter to figure if the Internet had crashed, it turned out to be a global outage.
According to web monitoring group Downdetector, the six-hour long crash that got users and Wall Street investors into panic is the largest ever outage with over 14 million reports. The outage had knocked off Mark Zuckerberg's global empire and no one had a clue on what exactly happened.
In the same time, Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth went down by $6 billion as share prices of the company fell by 4.9 per cent.
While Facebook has not confirmed the root cause of its woes, but clues abound on the internet. Some of them are perhaps are mere conspiracy theories, but the one thing that the outage proved is that millions of people and businesses are dependent on the company's social media platforms.
So, what exactly happened?
Facebook's family of apps effectively fell off the face of the internet at 11:40 am ET. This is the time its Domain Name System records became unreachable. A DNS record is a database record used to map a URL to an IP address. DNS records are stored in DNS servers and work to help users connect their websites to the outside world.
DNS mishaps are not uncommon. However, Troy Mursch, chief research officer of cyberthreat intelligence company Bad Packets told Wired that the DNS mishap is just a symptom of a bigger problem. The fundamental issue is that Facebook has withdrawn the so-called Border Gateway Protocol route that contains the IP addresses of its DNS nameservers. "It's a lot of jargon, but easy to put plain: Facebook has fallen off the internet's map," he said.
Through the time that the outage went on, Facebook sent out one tweet that said "working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible." After their services started trickling back on Tuesday morning (India morning), it sent a statement that didn't explain the cause of the outage. "To everyone who was affected by the outages on our platforms today: we're sorry," the company said. "We know billions of people and businesses around the world depend on our products and services to stay connected. We appreciate your patience as we come back online."
Zuckerberg, in a Facebook post, wrote, "Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about."
Facebook stated that "configuration changes" that route network traffic between its data centers was behind the outage. However, it did not state who was behind the configuration changes or whether it was planned.
The outage affected every geographical region, including India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Kuwait, and more.
In a blog post on Cloudflare, experts explain that Facebook servers simply stopped advertising its location on the internet which prevented other networks to find it. When Facebook became unreachable, Cloudfare started seeing increased DNS queries to Twitter, Signal and other messaging and social media platforms.
Which services were impacted?
Users were unable to access Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
The outage also impacted Oculus Quest VR headset with users reporting that they were unable to access games on the Facebook-owned VR headset.
Websites and services which use Facebook log-in were also effected.
Facebook's efforts to fix the issue were hampered with employees unable to access internal tools and communications platforms while many weren't able to enter buildings because their badges weren't working to access doors, tweeted a Tech reporter at NYT. However, BOOM was unable to independently verify these claims.
What has Facebook outage got to do with the whistleblower?
No one really knows if there's any connection, but the timing is peculiar.
Just a day before the outage, a whistleblower accused Facebook of prioritizing profits over tackling misinformation. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, revealed her identity in a CBS interview that aired on Sunday night. In the "60 Minutes" interview, she insisted that "Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety".
Haugen also has filed complaints with federal authorities alleging that Facebook's own research shows that it amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest, but the company hides what it knows.
The ex-employee challenging the social network giant with 2.8 billion users worldwide and nearly $1 trillion in market value is a 37-year-old data expert from Iowa with a degree in computer engineering and a master's degree in business from Harvard.
Haugen has turned over thousands of pages of Facebook's internal research to U.S. lawmakers that she had secretly copied before leaving her job in Facebook's civic integrity unit. Her lawyers have filed at least eight complaints with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
She is now set to testify to the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection at a hearing Tuesday.
Facebook has maintained that the allegations are baseless. In a statement, the company said that it seeks to balance free expression with the need to keep the platform safe.