Facebook is down on 10/4, but what does that mean for the company and its users? First and foremost, Facebook is down because of a security breach. As of 10/4, the company has not released any information about the extent of the attack or how it was able to access user data. However, some believe that Facebook was hacked. If Facebook were hacked, this would be a major setback for the company. Not only would users be without their favorite social media site, but also any information or photos they may have shared could be at risk. Additionally, if Facebook were hacked and user data was compromised, it could lead to lawsuits or other legal action taken against the company. What does this mean for you? If Facebook is down on 10/4, it means that something went wrong and your account may not be working as expected. If you are worried about your data being at risk, make sure to check back later today or tomorrow to see if there is any update on Facebook’s status.
As it turns out, the issue was caused by the network Facebook has built to connect all of its computing facilities together.
In a lengthy blog post, Facebook’s Santosh Janardhan said that everything broke during a routine maintenance job. “During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally,” the post said.
Of course, Facebook had a system in place to prevent a command like this from being executed, but a bug allowed it to slip through.
From there, the company’s DNS servers became unreachable, making it impossible for the rest of the internet to find Facebook’s servers. Thus, not only was the website down, but the domain was showing up for sale on various marketplaces.
Facebook also talked about why the outage lasted so long. The company’s engineers were unable to access the data centers remotely because their networks were down. Additionally, the loss of DNS broke the social network’s internal tools that it would use to investigate outages like the one that occurred on October 4, 2021.
Finally, Facebook’s own security caused it to take longer to get things up and running again. Here’s how Janardhan explained that:
Essentially, it wasn’t as easy to physically get to the location where the fix needed to be done as it could have been, which slowed everything down.
In the blog post, Facebook summarized the situation by saying, “We’ve done extensive work hardening our systems to prevent unauthorized access, and it was interesting to see how that hardening slowed us down as we tried to recover from an outage caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making.”
To put it simply, Facebook wasn’t hacked. There wasn’t a grand conspiracy to keep people quiet. A mistake made by the company itself caused everything to crash, and its security measures made it more difficult for its engineers to repair the problem. That’s all it was.
