SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC NEWS) – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp suffered a massive outage Monday which seemingly removed the popular social networking apps from the Internet for several hours.
Kareem Rigaud, an information technology expert, explained the outage stemmed from an issue with Facebook’s BGP routing. BGP routing, short for “border gateway protocol,” allows autonomous systems like servers to communicate. The same servers are used for all three services, and they can only connect to the Internet if they are all connected to each other.
With all of the servers disconnected from the web, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were forced to withdraw their DNS listings. DNS is short for “domain name system” and is the way websites are identified when someone surfs the web.
“Think of it like a phonebook for the Internet,” Rigaud said.
Withdrawing a DNS listing is akin to disconnecting a phone number. When Facebook’s nearly three billion users attempted to access the site Monday, their destination simply did not exist.
When asked if this outage would be a catalyst for any sort of change at Facebook or the social media landscape as a whole, Rigaud expressed doubt. He said an outage of this nature could very well happen again in the future.
“From my personal experience,” he said, “it comes down to cost. If the change to make things more protected or more reliable costs too much, most companies are not going to do it.”
