We live in a collaborative and interactive world which brings endless possibilities. Mobile operators form the pillars of a connected and efficient world. There are zillion advantages of being connected. However, yesterday was a day when we realized a potential downside.

Social platform giant Facebook and its associate platforms like Whatsapp, Instagram and Messenger have suffered a global outage as users were unable to use these media platforms. The service continued to be inactive for around six hours until finally it has been restored. Questions regarding the outage and reasons for taking a long time for restoration are being asked by millions of users.

Reasons for such outage: As soon as Facebook encountered this outage, millions of users started asking questions: is it occurred due to a major internal problem? Maybe the server got crashed? Maybe a major malware attack by third parties? Or maybe a pre-planned cyber attack on the Facebook data server?

Facebook has provided a blog post that gives a reason for such occurrence. The blog mentioned that Facebook’s engineering team has identified the configuration change on backbone routers as the main reason for this problem. According to them, routers responsible for network traffic coordination between data centers have encountered a configuration change and this incident has created a disruption to the network traffic. This disruption has created a “cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt” – according to the Facebook blog post.

This incident has severely affected the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Domain Name System (DNS) of Facebook. Due to configuration change, Facebook’s DNS servers became unavailable and BGP was unable to advertise Facebook’s presence on the Internet. The Domain Name System (DNS) and the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) are two components that determine how the internet works (BGP). We all know internet is buildup with numerous interconnected networks. So, to maintain the order need something called as BGP to inform you where you need to travel. DNS indicated the address system for each and every website’s location – as IP address. For identifies the most efficient route BGP will help to find. This is the process while connecting the network or this is the process taking part in networking for connecting huge numbers of people together.

Impact of outage: This incident has caused a major impact not only on general public but also on businesses. Facebook is not only used for chats and video calls among friends, it is also used by organizations for digital marketing, online sales and customer interactions. Facebook employees were unable to communicate among themselves due to the outage. They had to use Outlook email accounts for communication. Some Facebook employees had issues to enter office building as their digital badges were disabled.

Growing concern: At present, Facebook is considered as the biggest online social platform used by billions of people around the world. If such a giant corporation can suffer a major outage, it’s only a matter of time that small enterprises and corporations providing online services would suffer the same fate. In this digital age, everyone is focused on further development of technology while not creating enough concern about technology maintenance. To avoid such incidents, organizations need to adapt certain measures of maintaining online networks:

• Threat and Risk Analysis (TRA) to identify possible threats and risks so that appropriate measurements can be planned.
• Constant monitoring of virtual networks to identify any minor issues that could lead to major incidents.
• Configuration Management and Monitoring for not only Routers, but also all critical gateway assets in order to avoid malfunction issues.
• Use DNS anycast architecture to spread the surge on all sites rather than managing it individually with relevant DNS security policies in place with balanced DNS architecture and fallback plan
• Organize a Quick Response Team to make short-term configuration changes like reduction of time-out values.
• Proactive monitoring of heterogeneous landscape in order to have predicative visibility
• Implementation of a suitable disaster recovery plan so that quick recovery can be achieved during emergencies.
• Proper Business Continuity and Incident Response plan for predicative visibility and automated response.

Hope this blog provides you sufficient knowledge about the causes and impact of Facebook outage.

Prime Infoserv LLP is focused on Cyber Security Advisory Services with Managed Cyber Defense. You may go through our website https://primeinfoserv.com for more blogs on cyber security.

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