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OCTOBER 7, 2021 | The Jewish Home
this week to connect with people when Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down on Monday for hours. Facebook’s site wouldn’t load at all; Instagram and WhatsApp were accessible but could not load new content or send messages.
Facebook tweeted just after 6:30 pm ET that its apps and services were beginning to work again. “To the huge community of people and businesses around the world who depend on us: we’re sorry,” it said. “We’ve been working hard to restore access to our apps and services and are happy to report they are coming back online now. Thank you for bearing with us.” Later Monday, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s VP of infrastructure, released a statement saying the company was “sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms.” “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” Janardhan said. Janardhan said the company has “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.” Earlier, multiple security experts quickly pointed to a Domain Name System (DNS) problem as a possible culprit. Around 1 pm ET, Cisco’s internet analysis division ThousandEyes said on Twitter that its tests indicated the outage was due to an ongoing DNS failure. The DNS translates website names into IP addresses that can be read by a computer. It’s often called the “phonebook of the internet.” As services began to come back online, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted to his Facebook page. “Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now,” he wrote. “Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
Fat Bear Week
We may all be feeling a bit like we’re ready to start hibernating after all that challah we consumed over the past few weeks. In Alaska, and around the world, bears are preparing for a long winter – and that means that they’re gorging on salmon, berries, and veggies. Of course, who can’t resist an adorable bear delicately nibbling on leaves on a tree? And so, the folks in Alaska in charge of Katmai National Park and Preserve have created a contest to determine which bear is the cutest and roundest in the park. Fans can vote on their favorite bear online during Fat Bear Week, which ended on October 5. On the website, voters were able to view photos of their bears along with their winter weight. Last year, the Fat Bear Week web page had 1.6 million visits, with about 650,000 people actually participating in the voting. The event began in 2014, when it was just a one-day event. “Fat Bear Week gives us a chance to have a little fun,” Candice Rusch, spokesperson for Explore.org, noted. “It lets us celebrate the fact that the salmon run was healthy enough to get the bears (to) their peak fat state. And who doesn’t love how adorable the bears are as they round out in the fall?” Images of Winnie the Pooh and Paddington are popular characters for kids and adults. “When you look at how much weight bears need to gain to survive six months of famine, you can’t help but cheer them on. People love bears and they love a good competition,” said Amber Kraft, interpretation and education program manager at the Katmai National Park and Preserve. “For us, we are happy to share because fat bears exemplify the richness of Katmai National Park and Bristol Bay, Alaska.” The park, in the southwest corner of Alaska, is home to approximately 2,200 bears, according to a survey done in 2004. In 2020, there were more than 90 individual bears, not including cubs, along the Brooks Riv-
