Over 3.5 billion people use apps controlled by media giant Facebook.
October 4th, an industrial giant, Facebook, faced a cataclysmic shutdown forcing billions of people offline. All of Facebook servers shutdown that Monday. This resulted in a 6 hour period where no user on any of Facebook's apps were able to use them. These apps include, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Businesses all over the world rely on Facebook for their income and to have them shut down is a major loss in money for these small businesses.
“Officially, Facebook has said that an error with the BGP protocol (Border Gateway Protocol) occurred which caused Facebook's servers to become disconnected from the Internet itself," said Errol Shook, technology teacher for Watauga High School. "However, the reality is a cascading set of events occurred that caused multiple tiered failures.”
Software updates are interesting. They often need to be built in stages and layers so as to not confuse any other software building blocks that keep the system running, and when these stages are built out of order, things get chaotic.
If you include all of the other apps owned by Facebook, the number of people that use Facebook apps is over 3.5 billion people. That is an outrageous number of people who are just using their apps, with 1.6 billion of those users on WhatsApp alone.
“Many countries use Facebook as their primary source of information for government organizations vs the standard website you might see more commonly here," said Mr. Shook.
Government news is incredibly important as a citizen, especially in other countries, so to have that information restricted from you is a massive liability. Millions of people were left stuck in the dark about the cause of the shutdown for hours.
“Preventing another failure like this would be easier to control if each Facebook feature was its own entity without being tied fundamentally together like a knot," said Shook. "This would prevent one failed service to not cause all of the other services to fail.”
This is a significant failure for a global company like Facebook. No doubt the company will go to great lengths to prevent a similar outage from occurring again.
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