Facebook Says Massive Outage Was An “Error Of Our Own Making”
A major outage that hit Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger users globally for more than six hours had the world questioning what really went down yesterday. On Tuesday Facebook described the situation as a engineering “error of our own making.”
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According to reports, the outage may have cost the company up to $100 million! Which was caused because Facebook engineers were trying to place “a routine maintenance” job, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president shared in a blog post.
The engineers issued a statement “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,” he shared.
They also stated they have a tool in place to block that mistake from happening, but you know technology: it was hindered by a bug that prevented it.
“This change caused a complete disconnection of our server connections between our data centers and the internet. And that total loss of connection caused a second issue that made things worse,” Janardhan’s explanation gives further detail.
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That initial issue created problems with Facebook’s Domain Name System, which places domain names to the right IP addresses so that social users can surf popular websites.
“The end result was that our DNS servers became unreachable even though they were still operational. This made it impossible for the rest of the internet to find our servers,” Janardhan said.
“All of this happened very fast.”