Vladimir Radunovic Director, Cybersecurity and E-diplomacy, Diplo
How did Facebook go down: An analysis First published on Diplo Blog, 5 October On 4 October, Facebook and its sister services WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger went down for almost six hours, and reminded us how dependent we are on digital infrastructure. I tried explaining what went down via a video, and a text answering a few questions that can help us users and digital governance experts understand what happened and what we can learn for the future. To put it in simple terms, Facebook (and its services WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger) removed itself from the internet map: our devices were not able to find Facebook. But the reason it was down for six hours was that Facebook was not able to find itself either. It was ‘locked out’ of its own apartment. That means Facebook employees weren’t able to remotely access their own services and servers to solve the problem, so they had to fly people to California to physically access servers and routers and change what is known as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) settings that messed up Facebook’s connectivity. The security of the BGP is one of the topical issues among internet experts. Thus, it will be essential to hear from Facebook if it happened due to an attack or a structural weakness. Until this tech giant makes a statement with further clarifications, here are four possible scenarios that led to Facebook’s longest downtime ever.
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