Facebook's outage of 4th October, 2021 [webmasterworld.com] was one of the most significant as it lasted for many hours, and resulted in Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram becoming unavailable. The services eventually returned about six hours after they first fell over.
This outage to a major business has significant impacts to revenues and share prices, so there are lessons to learn for everyone, no matter the business size and scope.
Facebook has published an explanation which explains that configuration changes on its backbone routers which coordinate network traffic to its datacenters caused the interruption to the services, which caused a cascading effect.
Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.
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engineering.fb.com...]
Cloudflare has published an interesting assessment of outage, describing the issues, and talking about BGP (Border Gateway Protocol).
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blog.cloudflare.com...]
Facebook Outage Oct 4, 2021: Backbone Router Configuration Disrupted All Traffic
