Monday’s Facebook outage, along with the other social media platforms owned by the company, has many asking what happened and was the company hacked. Host of Tech Gumbo Haggai Davis said the company was doing a system upgrade and the Border Gate Protocol which acts as the post office sending you to a proper address in this case facebook.com and that’s when things went dark shortly before noon.
“They brought the whole thing down, so they eliminated the BGP from all of the internet service providers across the planet, so nobody knew that Facebook existed for six and a half hours,” said David.
The timing of yesterday’s outage was suspicious especially after a Facebook whistleblower appeared on 60 Minutes Sunday night claiming the company promoted misinformation and hate speech in an effort to increase profits.
Davis said it was an internal issue and said only large service providers, like Verizon and companies like Google, work with BGP, and the six-hour outage was reminiscent of a Three Stooges episode.
“Somebody sneezed when he hit a button, or did something, or Curly swung around with a 2X4 and knocked something off of a rack. That’s what brought Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp down,” said Davis.
While an upgrade to the BGP is only done by large companies and one that causes a system to go dark doesn’t happen often, Davis said programmers are human and it will happen again.
“When simple mistakes happen in what should have been a routine upgrade and that one setting takes the whole thing down, it’s just not a good thing,” said Davis.
In addition to Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp all went dark for six and a half hours Monday.
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