New York. September 4. About six hours after Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram failed, the service "gradually began to return to the network."
"We know that some people have trouble accessing our applications and products," Facebook said in a Twitter message. "We are working to get everything back on track as soon as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
Fault detector on the outage tracking site - registered tens of thousands of reports for each of the services. The official Facebook site did not load on Monday for about an hour; and Instagram and WhatsApp were available, but could not download new content (or send messages).
The reason for the shutdown was not immediately clear. However, several security experts quickly pointed to a problem with the Domain Name System (DNS) as a possible culprit. At about 1 p.m. Eastern Time, Cisco's Internet analytics team said on Twitter that the "breakdown" was apparently caused by a prolonged DNS crash.
In general, DNS converts website names into computer-readable IP addresses. Therefore, it is often called the "Internet phone book".
More than four hours after the shutdown began, when many people began to panic, Facebook CTO Mike Schrepfer wrote (on Twitter): "We are having problems with the network and the team is working to fix everything and restore ". At first it seemed a bit like a simple reassurance and excuse.
However, after 18:30 (Eastern time) Facebook wrote that its programs and services started working again.
"To a large community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we apologize," it said. "We are working hard to restore access to our applications and services and are pleased to announce that they are now back online. Thank you for your patience."
Consequences
Although the "breakdown" was repaired relatively quickly, I would still like to summarize some results.
It is known that Facebook shares fell in one day - by more than 5% (which is hundreds of millions of dollars). However, this is not important for ordinary users of the social network.
First, the shutdown of all Facebook systems, which lasted about six hours, not only deprived three billion users of the company access to Facebook and its services: Instagram and WhatsApp; but also affected the internal systems of employees.
Second, the shutdown was so severe that not only ordinary workers but also engineers (who were tasked with helping solve the problem) could not log in at first.
Thirdly, as paradoxical as it may sound, in my opinion, what happened made people feel "how much they need Facebook." After all, things like Facebook and Instagram are not just messengers, with which we keep in touch with friends and family. But, these are also our "photo albums", "business cards" and "whole directories" about us as a person or about our business. (Many people start appreciating something only when they lose it)
Involuntarily forced to agree with D. Medori, director of the company monitoring the network "Kentik" (which actually analyzes the state of the "World Wide Web" or the Internet). In an interview with CNN, he said that for many people, Facebook is "the Internet," and that he "does not know if he has seen such a shutdown before in a large Internet company."
The fact that a company of such size and resources as Facebook has been offline for more than four hours suggests that there is no quick fix.
October 5, 2021