In the end, not even the internal communication in the Facebook group worked. “Literally welcome everyone,” sneered the short message service Twitter on its own account. What happened? The experts puzzled about this, but one thing was clear: Facebook and two of its other services, WhatsApp and Instagram, were not available anywhere in the world. A Facebook spokesman apologized via Twitter and could only say what stressed IT users around the world hate: The solution to the problem is being worked on.
What exactly is behind the massive failure is unclear. The Facebook group does not, however, assume an attack, like employees of the group of New York Times said. Internet experts see a possible reason in the so-called Domain Name System (DNS). A worldwide network of special server computers ensures that you are directed to the correct page when you enter an address such as sz.de or facebook.com. Because the servers actually have names made up of long strings of digits, the IP addresses, which hardly anyone can remember. As some experts reported, the DNS entries of the Facebook services disappeared from this service, which controls the data traffic, and were thus virtually invisible to the network infrastructure.
DNS malfunctions are not uncommon. It was not until July that numerous websites were temporarily unavailable due to such a malfunction. The trigger at the time were problems at the web service provider Akamai, whose distributed infrastructure ensures, for example, that video streams reach users smoothly. Since some large providers offer such services centrally, a failure can carry away many other services and websites and make them inaccessible. At the beginning of June, numerous websites around the world were already unavailable for around an hour after a malfunction in the Fastly cloud service.
The DNS malfunction could have been caused by an incorrect configuration in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). It connects the individual networks, so-called autonomous systems, to what is known as the Internet. The service provider Cloudflare, which, among other things, fends off attacks from the network, reports that there were a number of BGP updates shortly before the failure.
The failure comes at an inopportune time
Whatever the reason for the failure – it definitely comes at an inopportune time for the company. A whistleblower had initially criticized the Facebook group anonymously, then with full credit. The former employee accused billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s company of not doing enough against the hate speech and misinformation spread on the company’s platforms. When in doubt, Facebook has always chosen to make a profit instead of deleting the controversial content. The company lies when it comes to the company’s progress in combating hate speech and misinformation on its platform, even if no one in the company acts maliciously.
It is the last in a slew of beatings to fall on Facebook. At least since the allegations in connection with the election of Donald Trump as US President, which was also manipulated by Russia via social networks, the criticism has increased. Then there was the scandal surrounding the British company Cambridge Analytica, which misused data that had actually been released for research purposes. Co-founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg had to report to Washington several times, the reputation of his company is bad. Several advertisers announced their withdrawal. Overall, the bad publicity did not harm Facebook financially, the profits continued to flow. However, it doesn’t have to stay that way forever.