The root cause of the large downtime of the Facebook app for several hours is the configuration error of the backbone router


NEW YORK, NY-OCTOBER 25: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pauses while speaking about the new Facebook News feature at the Paley Center For Media on October 25, 2019 in New York City. Facebook News, which will appear in a new dedicated section on the Facebook app, will offer stories from a mix of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, as well as other digital-only outlets. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Drew Angerer via Getty Images

From about 11 o’clock last night, Facebook and its Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and other services began to have large-scale usage problems on a global scale. It wasn’t until this morning that these apps finally came back online one after another. During the nearly 7-hour repair process, Facebook also encountered difficulties such as the inability to open corporate tools such as email and Workplace.Even the door card system of the server room was also affected by the disaster. It is said that maintenance personnelHad to use a cutting machineOnly then was able to enter the server security cage.

During the major downtime, many security experts speculated that the root cause of the problem may be the Border Gateway Protocol (Border Gateway Protocol).And in the follow-upOfficial statement, Facebook’s engineering team wrote: “We have discovered that the communication interruption is caused by the configuration change of the backbone router that coordinates the network traffic between the data centers. This interruption has a collateral impact on the communication between the data centers. Our service has come to a standstill.” At the same time, it also emphasized that the problem was entirely caused by a “configuration error” and there is currently no evidence of user data leakage.

After this incident, Facebook’s stock price fell sharply, not surprisingly, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s value suddenly shrank.Billions of dollars. Not long ago, a former employee jumped out and accused Facebook that it would only “put its interests above safety”. Coupled with the negative impact of the major downtime, Zuckerberg has really been in a bad shape recently…