After six hours of blackouts, one of the longest and most complex in Facebook’s history, Mark Zuckerberg has revealed himself – finally – on his social network, to apologize: “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for today’s outage, I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
A few lines below, among the most appreciated comments, is that of father Edward Zuckerberg: “You may have contributed to the next baby boom in nine months!”. But there is little to joke, for Facebook. Following the serious disruption, the day after the revelations of his former employee Frances Haugen on the popular 60 Minutes show, Facebook shares fell 5%. According to what Bloomberg writes, the losses of the founder Mark Zuckerberg amount to 6 billion dollars.
In addition to those of its founder, the official Facebook apologies have also arrived: “To the large community of people and businesses around the world who rely on us: we are sorry. We have worked hard to reactivate our apps and services and we are happy to say that everything is back online now. Thank you for supporting us.” .
These have not been easy hours for the colossus of Menlo Park. The reporters of the New York Times, during the very long down, reported the problems encountered by employees at work to solve the problem: Many were unable to access Facebook buildings because their badges did not work. And then the chaos of the emails: Facebook was not reachable and the same happened to the e-mail addresses of the employees.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram suddenly went down due to a DNS problem. In practice, every computer must convert the addresses we use, such as “http://www.facebook.com” in fact, into an IP address (which is numeric) so that the browser or an app can connect to the site. For hours the Facebook DNS that allow this conversion – a sort of mapping between names and numbers – have not worked, and this has made its services unreachable by users.
The technical problem was confirmed by Facebook with a note that reads: “Our engineering teams have identified the problem in the configuration changes of our routers that coordinate network traffic “.
The last time Zuckerberg’s three services were unreachable, all at the same time, was on March 19th.: the disservice in that case lasted about an hour.
A year earlier, exactly on March 13, 2019, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram faced what was the longest blackout in their history so far, with disruptions that lasted hours, due (according to what Facebook communicated the following day) to a server configuration change.
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