The night of the collapse of the Blue Empire: What happened?And why?

Digital darkness;This was what the world was feeling last night for a period of 6 hours.Or at least half of the population of the planet who use the blue social network "Facebook", and its other services such as "Messenger", "WhatsApp" and "Instagram"!

We do not yet know the reason behind this tremendous interruption, but at least we have some information about how it occurs.Well what happened specifically?

What happened to Facebook?

Kentik, a network monitoring company in San Francisco, reported that at 05:39 pm Cairo time, on Monday 4 October, a person inside Facebook updated Border Gateway Protocol records, or an acronym (BGP),Hence the calamities, what is the role of these protocols in particular?

Certainly you have passed the term domain names system, or DNS, which can be described as an internet address book, and the role of translating the names of the sites you write in the URL like IDA2at.Com to the IP Internet Protocol addresses, and those addresses can be considered the house in which these sites live on the Internet.

DNS problems are common and widespread, and often the reason behind the interruption or fall of a specific location of the network, and can occur due to various types of technical causes, which are often related to errors and problems in the settings, but most of the time are relatively clear and can be solved quickly.But what happened in the case of Facebook, yesterday, was more dangerous.

The main problem here is that Facebook has pulled the basic digital records of BGP border steering protocols that contain IP addresses for the domains of the DNS network.If the DNS is the Internet address book, the BGP protocol is the navigation system, which decides how the data and any way it takes, while traveling on its journey from your device to access to the different sites of the sites.

These basic digital records can be considered as the role of Google GPS maps, but for computers and other smart devices connected to the Internet, these records tell different devices how to find Facebook on the Internet.

In the simplest sense, when you search for the Facebook address address.com inside your internet browser, these records tell your device where to search for the company's servers, and when the device reaches these servers, you see the usual blue Facebook entry page for you.

While what happened is that these records suddenly disappeared, as if someone burned all these maps, so your device, your smartphone and anything connected to the Internet, could not find "Facebook".The problem is not in your device or phone, the problem here is more complicated, because Facebook has disappeared in the literal sense of the word from the Internet.As if the darkness here hit the entire blue social network, and it became hidden from the eyes of the devices on the Internet!

Of course, with the disappearance of the Facebook site, the disappearance of the rest of the services, such as the two messaging application, "Messenger" and "WhatsApp", and the application of "Instagram" photos.This left billions of users without any social networks, as if we had returned in twenty years!

The biggest problem is that this interruption did not affect the usual services of Facebook, but it also affected the internal Facebook tools that the company's employees use to work and communicate with each other..This is because the e -mail and the tools of the platform are all managed from within the company, and through the same ranges that disappeared from the entire Internet.All of these tools disrupted the team to the use of external tools to complete their business, but the main problem remained without a solution.

Is it a major penetration process?

These changes have already come from within the company, because "Facebook" controls these records internally, and here there was a mistake that caused the erasure of those maps that we talked about, which caused the problem of interruption.The engineering team of Facebook has indicated that the problem was due to amending settings on the main routers within the company's servers.

Such a problem occurred during the past year, and we saw a number of these major interruptions of Facebook and its various services, as they had a kind of settings update for their global network that deviated from its path as well, but then it did not take a long time.Most experts expect that this time they were the ones who did so, but it is an irreplaceable exacerbation.

What is the reason for the exacerbation of the problem more, that they lost their ability to enter the company's servers on the network, because it disappeared as we explained, and therefore it became imperative that they go to the company's headquarters itself, and solve the problem manually from the inside..But it seems that those present there did not have enough knowledge of how to solve this problem, and they had to wait for some experts so that they could solve it!

A tweet from a journalist in the "New York Times" also indicated that one of the Facebook employees told her that they faced a problem in entering the company's buildings, because the employee entry cards were broken because of their association with the system, and thus Facebook engineers faced a problem in reaching the company's servers inside youThey download new BGP records to the Internet.It is one of the main reasons for this huge interruption for 6 hours.

District leaks from Dakhlv Facebook!

The strange coincidence, that the fall of Facebook services came a few hours after broadcasting the 60 -minute program episode, on the CBS network, which broadcast an interview with a previous employee at Facebook, which is Francis Hugin, who recently brought up a number of internal documents that the company owes onKnow that its products cause huge damage to users, and that the company gives priority to profits rather than taking more serious steps to reduce the abuse of its various platforms, including misleading and false information and hate speech.

The documents indicate that Facebook algorithms are inflated and focused on hate, false information and political turmoil, but the company hides what you know of course.Those documents first appeared last month, in the Wall Street Journal, but it was not revealed at that time, but in the episode of "60 minutes", Francis Hugin revealed her identity to explain why she presented those documents condemning the company "Facebook".

The entire internet!

When a Facebook size platform disappears from the Internet, there are huge repercussions that occur along the way.For example, web sites that aim to tell you if the various services are broken, such as IS IT Right Now, fell under tremendous pressure because of the amount of people trying to see the case of "Instagram" and "Facebook".

"Cloudflare", a company that provides DNS services, reported that it had to use additional resources in order to keep pace with the attempts of millions of users to re -download the Facebook website, "Instagram" or "WhatsApp", over and over again.

But perhaps the biggest beneficiary of this fall was the "Twitter" platform, although it also suffered from some slowdown due to the transfer of billions of users to it, so that the official account of the platform, and the account of its founder, Jack Dorusi, was happy and began to exploit the situation and spread some satirical tweets.

But within twelve in the morning, Facebook services began to gradually return.It is not much about the dramatic story of how the entire internet collapse and fall, or by hacking from a 13 -year -old Chinese hacker, or such theories currently prevalent, but it can be said that it is more related to one huge and interconnected system, and the system may collapse like anything else because of some mistakesTechnical or human, and you may not always feel such problems because there are people watching the situation day and night, but when you meet more than one problem at the same time, we will definitely feel as if the world is collapsing!