On Tuesday 5th October, 2021, Facebook International experienced an outage in its DNS server causing its four platforms – Oculus, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook to shut down for about six hours.
In a statement released by the company, a faulty configuration change was responsible for the disruption.
The company said that the outage also affected many internal systems used within the company thereby, complicating attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
Some experts have however, expressed a view that the delay in fixing the problem occurred because Facebook users and the staff use the same systems to access the network remotely and this prevented workers from fixing the outage immediately, making physical refreshing at data centres, the only solution.
It was revealed further that the problem had to do with the way the internet traffic is routed around the world by two important technologies – Domain Name Service(DNS) and Border Gateway Protocol(BGP).
Some experts also aver that the crash was an internal problem.The engineers issued a command that unintentionally disconnected its data centres from the rest of the world.
Although, these explanations seem plausible, some commentators have expressed that internal sabotage may have caused the outage while some others believe that the real cause of the outage remain undisclosed to members of the public and would somehow come to light someday.
