Okay, okay… I’m sure Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Co won’t be going anywhere anytime soon – but today has been interesting.
Unless you live under a rock and/or actually followed through with your declaration to leave Facebook “for totes real this time”, you’re likely very aware of today’s outage of some very popular services.
With a mixture of cries, sighs, and giggles, the world has been collectively forced to come to terms with what a day in their life without Facebook/Instagram would look like.
To me, one of the highlights today has been the brand clowing taking place on Twitter (unquestionably the dominant social media platform today), which has included Facebook brands, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, playing along themselves.
I won’t go too deep into the technical, as there are people far more qualified than I who have already done so (here’s one from ArsTechnica). But basically, there are services that monitor and share routes that are used to make devices/services communicate with other devices/services on the Internet (RGP – Border Gateway Protocol) – and a configuration update was pushed(reportedly by Facebook themselves) that deleted the routes that told the rest of the Internet how to access the Facebook-owned stuff.
To add insult to injury, reportedly the Facebook staff tasked with cleaning up this mess have been locked out of the physical locations that they require access to as a result of this screwup 🤣 Making matters worse, both Facebook/Instagram users, coupled with client applications (such as the Facebook and Instagram apps installed on Phones that automatically poll for updates), are hammering all of the DNS services that play a role in getting users from point A to point B, bringing these vital services to their knees. We’re now hours into the outage, with no end in sight – it’s almost as if the Internet is a house of cards, just waiting to collapse (Narrator: “it is”).
Anywho… Here are some highlights:
