Unsplash / Markus Spiske Understand the Facebook flaw
Facebook and its other services, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, were not only offline on Monday (4), but they also ceased to exist for the internet.
After a chaotic day, the company released an explanation for the collapse of its services, written by Facebook̵
7;s vice president of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan. After nearly 7 hours of sleep, the executive said that “the configuration changes in the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers have caused problems that disrupted this communication.”
facebook has disappeared from the internet
But, after all, what does this mean? Alberto Azevedo, CEO of cyber security firm CYB3R, says Facebook has simply ceased to exist.
“Facebook wasn’t just down, it wasn’t a situation where I was trying to access the site and the server was down. Facebook literally went off the internet yesterday. It went back and forth,” he says. “Facebook’s failure was really very complex, which is why it was very serious.”
Alberto explains that the Internet is multi-layered and that yesterday’s problem occurred in a network layer, which is profound. Each Internet distribution node communicates with some other nodes, which communicate with others, and so on. “That’s it: I know my neighbors, but my neighbors know the neighbors, and it goes on until it reaches an entire city,” explains the specialist.
And for communication between these nodes to take place, a server must announce the existence of a certain service. “To exist on the internet I need to advertise: I am here, these are my addresses and I am in these places”, says Alberto.
After a mistake in a configuration, the Facebook server simply stopped announcing its existence. This information stopped circulating between nodes and, for the end user, the result was a drop in service.
“That server that did the ads saying,” I’m here, “said,” I’m nowhere else. “It has withdrawn all ads from where Facebook was. Once the ads are withdrawn, the Internet forgets about you, it’s as if you no longer exist there “, explains Alberto.
It could have been worse
Facebook did not disclose the exact reason that triggered the series of errors, but Alberto says it may have been something simple, like a mistake in a daily task. If someone has executed a wrong command, for example, it is enough for the error to occur.
The problem was only so serious because it occurred in a deep layer of the internet. “The Internet has seven layers. The protocols that we know, namely HTTP, HTTPS, where the Internet actually works, are all in layer seven. This protocol BGP [onde ocorreu o erro] it is in level four, a network level. In other words, it works over there. ”
“Usually 90% of problems can be solved remotely. Now, when you have a problem to solve at the network level, you have to be on the server,” says Alberto. That’s why Facebook moved teams to its servers, and employees still faced building access issues because badges didn’t work either.
Given the magnitude of the error, it was possible that Facebook’s services were back on the air by mistake or took too long to recover. “Facebook has the best of the best at work. When you think about the scale of the problem, the fact that they are back on the air in seven hours is impressive. Out of the air,” assesses the specialist.