I.In a way, the Internet was idle on Tuesday night. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger – four of the most relevant social media in the world, all of which are part of the Facebook group – were offline for six hours around the world. Experts spoke of the longest and most extensive failure in recent history. However, “the Internet” did not come to a standstill, because users quickly gathered on other portals. In the meantime, all services are running as usual – and Facebook itself has reported what the problem was. But it is still unclear how it actually came about. Here are the answers to the most important questions.
Was it a hacker attack?
No, apparently not. No expert questioned by the FAZ saw any signs of this. Instead, the problem seems to have been of a technical nature – in some ways a classic IT problem, as it regularly occurs in many companies, and from which Facebook was not immune.
According to the company, the reason was an incorrect setting in a very basic system of the various Facebook platforms – namely the one that ensures that they can be reached from the Internet. Programmers had apparently made mistakes when reconfiguring the “backbone” routers that coordinate the network traffic between Facebook’s data centers, as the company writes.
Seen from the outside, this meant that Facebook’s servers could no longer be found on the Internet. “As if someone had removed the exit signs to the ‘places’ Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook on a motorway,” said Rüdiger Trost from the IT security company F-Secure. The services were still there – only “the Internet no longer knows where to find them,” said Johannes Ullrich, research director at the cybersecurity institute SANS.
The fact that all four Facebook services failed at the same time seems to be due to the fact that the Facebook group has put all of its formerly separate services (Instagram was acquired in 2012, WhatsApp in 2014) on a common technical platform. The group first announced this in 2019.
Why did it take so long to fix the problem?
Because the error was at such a fundamental point, it had an impact on almost all systems in the Facebook group – right down to the digital door controls and other networked devices in the company’s buildings. And because the servers could not be reprogrammed remotely, according to the New York Times, a team of technicians even had to drive to a Facebook data center in Santa Clara, California, to manually press the reset button.
Because of these adversities, according to the cloud service Cloudflare, it took from 5:51 p.m. to around 11:20 p.m. on Monday evening until Facebook’s services could be accessed again from the Internet. It took more time until the servers had put through all WhatsApp messages that had been sent to no avail during this time – but according to the architecture of the messenger service, no message should have been lost.
What consequences did the failure have for Facebook’s competitors?
On the one hand, the failure showed how firmly the Facebook services are integrated into the everyday lives of numerous users. The Berlin creative agency ABCD Agency calculated that 25 billion WhatsApp messages were not sent and 125 million Instagram stories were not published in the photo network during the six hours. Overall, Instagram users would have gained 63 million hours of time that they would otherwise have spent between photos and stories.
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