#Whatsapp outage reason update#

There is also a precedent for BGP meddling being at the root of a social media shutdown. This week's Facebook outage was rare in its length and scale, however. Social media outages are not uncommon: Instagram alone has experienced more than 80 in the past year in the United States, according to website builder ToolTester. The knock-on effects of the shutdown included some Facebook employees being unable to even enter their buildings because their security badges no longer worked, further slowing the response. 'That streamlines things on a daily basis - but because everything is in the same place, when that place has a problem, nothing works.' 'For security reasons, Facebook has had to very strongly concentrate its infrastructure,' he said.

READ | Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp hit by global outage.

'Normally it's good not to put all your eggs in one basket,' said Pierre Bonis of AFNIC, the association that manages domain names in France.

#Whatsapp outage reason update#

Why did it take so long to fix the problem?Įxperts say Facebook's technical infrastructure is unusually reliant on its own systems - and that proved disastrous on Monday.Īfter Facebook sent the fateful routing update, its engineers got locked out of the system that would allow them to communicate that the update had, in fact, been an error. It's not yet clear how or why, but Facebook's routers essentially sent a message to the internet announcing that the company's servers no longer existed. In the same way that air traffic controllers sometimes make changes to flight schedules, 'Facebook did an update of these routes,' Slim said.īut this update contained a crucial error. Sami Slim of data centre company Telehouse compared BGP to 'the internet equivalent of air traffic control'. His company is said to have lost $7 billion (€6 billion) as a result of the outage.Cyber experts think the problem boils down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Patrol - the system the internet uses to pick the quickest route to move packets of information around.

There were those who saw God's hand behind the event. Amad Osikhotse wrote: 'The time has come for the physical world to understand what God is: He is the controller of each and everything.'ĭid God hack Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg, at least, said there was no hack at all. And it angered some users so much that they felt like throwing their cellphones against the wall, they wrote.Ĭonspiracy theorists had a field day. 'I think that UFOs have played their part in the shutdown,' said Sahr Tengbeh's. I restarted it more than 50 times,' wrote Jacinta Nicolau, from Mozambique.

But the traditional way can be quite expensive, while a phone call or message on Whatsapp or Facebook is free, users noted. Others discovered that they could use their phones for calling friends over phone lines. Not everyone was distraught by the outage: 'I was happy, because I enjoyed six hours chatting with my neighbors,' Lemi Bacha said. Many users worldwide found it hard to deal with the six-hour outage 'Given the current state of the world, a day without internet is like a year without rain,' said Charles Bazema from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Some didn't feel that it was a laughing matter.

The dictator banned it last year.'Ĭlemanthane Attideka DeKpotivi, from Ghana, was more worried about his love life. 'And if we file a complaint against Mark, who has sunk millions of business and even my love relationship? It was almost over when my girlfriend came without notice, under the pretext that she had written to me on WhatsApp and I did not see it,' he joked. Monica Mupenzi pointed the finger at the ruler of the country: 'In autocratic Uganda they didn't even realize FB was off. In Uganda, Matovi Asad reacted on Facebook after he reconnected: 'Seriously, I thought the Ugandan Government had finally found a way to ban social media, because even VPN wasn't helping.'

Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram platforms crashed on Monday because of a faulty configuration change, the company said Relationships in jeopardy