Internet malfunctions: what are the causes of their frequent occurrence and how can they be solved?

I have a suspicion that Mark Zuckerberg reads the huge number of comments that thousands of users leave on his Facebook posts.

But if he actually reads it, it would take him about 145 days without sleep to be able to dive into the torrent of comments that poured in after he apologized for the glitch that took his company's social media platforms down for nearly six hours.

Six hours after the complete failure of Facebook, Messenger applications, Instagram and WhatsApp, the founder and CEO of Facebook posted on his account on the giant social platform, a small statement saying, "Sorry for the disturbance that occurred today."

Facebook said the failure occurred during routine maintenance, when its engineers inadvertently issued an order that disconnected Facebook's data from the main Internet.

About 827,000 people commented on Zuckerberg's apology.

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Comments ranged from wit such as an Italian user's comment "It was awful, I had to talk to my family", to confusion and bewilderment such as the comment by a person from Namibia "I took my phone to a repair shop. I thought it was broken."

Of course, it was not without its very upset and angry comments, such as "You can't shut down everything at once. The damage is huge," a comment written by a Nigerian businessman. Another demanded from India compensation for the disruption of his business.

The dependence of billions of people on these services is clear and well known, not only for entertainment, but also as a major means of communication, commerce and conducting business.

Teenage taboos, presented by Karima Kouh and prepared by Mais Baqy.

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What has also become clear is that what happened is not a one-time accident. Experts predict that these services will become more disruptive as the frequency of widespread outages increases.

"One of the things we've noticed over the past several years is the increasing reliance on a small number of networks, and companies publishing a large amount of content on the Internet," says Luke Derricks, chief technology officer of the online platform Downde Doctor.

Derricks and his team at Downdedoctor monitor web services and websites for malfunctions or malfunctions. He says widespread outages affecting key services are becoming more frequent and dangerous.

Derricks explains, “When a problem occurs on one or more of these sites, it affects not just them, but hundreds of thousands of other services associated with them. Facebook, for example, is now used to log into a range of different services and devices, such as devices Smart TV.

"And that's why we have this kind of 'paralysis days' on the internet, which is happening right now. Something's broken, and we're all looking at each other, 'OK! What are we going to do now?'"

Derricks notes, "When Facebook has a problem, it has a huge impact not only on Internet users, but also on the economy, on society as a whole. Millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people, are sitting around waiting for a small team in California to fix it. It's an interesting phenomenon. It has grown over the past two years."

Notable service failures

October 2021: A “server settings error” disabled Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram for nearly 6 hours. There were also outages on other sites such as Twitter, due to the sudden large increase in the number of people accessing it.

July 2021: More than 48 services, including Airbnb, Expedia, Home Depot and Salesforce, down for about an hour after a DNS error at the Akame content delivery company. And that's after a month of a similar break in the company.

And in June 2021: service on Amazon Reddit, Twitch, GetHub, Shopify and Spotify stopped, and many news sites were down for about an hour due to a previously unknown virus, which caused a customer to mistakenly enter the cloud computing service provider Fastly.

December 2020: Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and other Google services were down simultaneously for about 90 minutes, after which the company said it had an "internal storage quota issue".

November 2020: A technical issue at an Amazon Services site in Virginia, USA affected the services of thousands of other sites online for several hours, mostly in North America.

March 2019: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp either crashed or had severe outages for about 14 hours after "changing a server's settings". Some other platforms, including Tinder and Spotify, which use Facebook to log in, were also affected.

During a major outage, people were sure at some point worried that this was the result of some kind of cyber attack, which might compromise their personal information.

What about the future?

But experts say that most of the time it is due to small human errors, but it can be exacerbated by the way the Internet is linked to a set of complex legacy systems.

During the Facebook outage, Twitter experts joked that those usually suspected of causing outage problems were much older than the generation that saw the Spice Girls become famous.

Internet scientist Professor Bill Buchanan says, "The Internet is not the distributed wide area network that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the foundations for the creation of the Internet) tried to make, to be able to withstand even a nuclear attack on any part of it.

"The protocols in use today are those that were initially formulated when we first connected the mainframes with the supplied stations. A single flaw in the basic infrastructure can cause everything to crash."

Prof Buchanan believes that improvements to make the Internet more resilient are possible, but many of the network's fundamentals remain, for better or worse.

"The systems generally work," he says. "You can't shut down a particular Internet system for a day and try to rebuild it."

Rather than trying to rebuild the systems and architecture of the Internet, Professor Buchanan believes we need to make improvements to the way data is stored and shared, and unless that happens, there is a risk of more mass outages in the future.

In Professor Konan's opinion, the Internet has become too centralized, and there is a lot of data coming from a single source. He explains that this trend needs to be transformed into systems that contain multiple sources, so that the failure of one of them does not lead to a service interruption.

But there is a positive side. Although major Internet outages affect the lives of users and the work of companies, in the end, they can help improve the resilience of the Internet and web services in general.

For example, Facebook's losses, according to Forbes estimates, amounted to 66 million dollars, during a six-hour break, due to the suspension of ads or the withdrawal of some advertisers. The scale of the loss is likely to cause CEOs to work hard to prevent a recurrence.

“They lost a huge amount of money that day, not only in their stock price but also in their operating returns,” says Professor Buchanan, who believes they will now do everything in their power to ensure uninterrupted service in the future.