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What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp?

posted by martyb on Monday October 04 2021, @07:47PM   
from the What's-up?-Not-WhatsApp dept.

upstart writes:

What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp?:

Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don't yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world's computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That's because Facebook's email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

[...] This is a developing story and will likely be updated throughout the day.

Also at: C|Net and Ars Technica.

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Original Submission

• Protection from downed DNS like this... apk Protection from downed DNS like this... apk (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @12:50AM (3 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @12:50AM (#1184334)

  See subject: A P K Hosts File Engine 2.0++ 64-bit for Linux/BSD h t t p : / / a p k . i t - m a t e . c o . u k / A P K H o s t s F i l e E n g i n e F o r L i n u x . z i p (remove spaces & download)

  Yields more security/speed/reliability/anonymity vs. any 1 solution (99% of threats use hostnames vs. IP address most firewalls use) more efficiently/FASTER + NATIVELY 4 less.

  Vs. "Bolt on 'MoAr' illogic-logic" slowing you hosts speed u up 2 ways: Adblocks + Hardcode fav. sites u spend most time @ vs. competition loaded w/ security bugs (DNS/AntiVir) + overheads slowing u (messagepass 'souled-out' to advertisers easily detected & blocked addons + firewall filtering drivers) & their complexity leads to exploitation!

  * ONLY 1 of its kind in GUI 4 Linux/BSD!

  (Better vs. Windows model in speed/efficiency/merge)

  APK

  P.S.=> Protects vs. script trackers/ads/DNS request tracking + redirect poisoned or downed DNS/botnets/malware downloads/malcript/email malicious payloads... apk

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		-1
  Troll=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Troll' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		-1

• Re:Protection from downed DNS like this... apk Re:Protection from downed DNS like this... apk (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @01:04AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @01:04AM (#1184337)

  Hosts files do nothing when the actual IP address is unreachable.

  Parent

  • Re:Protection from downed DNS like this... apk (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @01:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @01:30AM (#1184339)

    Yes but what if you implement it in Pascal?

    Parent

• Re:Protection from downed DNS like this... apk (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @07:14AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05 2021, @07:14AM (#1184378)

  Lawl

  Parent