Massive Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram failures

In the evening of October 4 there was one of the biggest failures in the work of Facebook services.

The cause of the failure was the disappearance of DNS records from the global routing tables.

The social networks Facebook, Instagram and messenger WhatsApp were unavailable for about 6 hours.

On Monday October 4 several services of American corporation Facebook were unavailable all over the world. The failure occurred at about 18.30 MSK and initially affected Facebook, but later the company-owned WhatsApp and Instagram also "went down".

Presumably, the cause of the problems lies in the disappeared from the global routing table entries DNS, that is, missing from the system links between the domain name and IP-address of the server at which the actual site.

Sources in the major media outlets also confirm this version. Brian Krebs, a journalist for the Independent, also said on his Twitter that the error occurred due to the planned update BGP (dynamic routing protocol), and, according to his information, the update blocked access for remote users, and therefore all the changes could only be made by people with physical access, which was also complicated.

The situation was slightly aggravated by the fact that employees of the company could not get to their workplaces to assess the extent of the problem, because the system of electronic passes also failed. This was reported by The New York Times journalist Shira Frankel on her Twitter.