The biggest Facebook outage ever

The biggest Facebook outage ever

New York, Oct. 6, 2021

Facebook, including its WhatsApp and Instagram services, suffered a six-hour outage on Monday.

Facebook said configuration changes to backbone routers, which coordinate traffic between data centers, caused the outage.

Cloudflare reported at 11:51 a.m. ET a DNS outage originating from Facebook and its associated services, and that the infrastructure IP was unreachable. John Graham- Cumming, Cloudflare’s CTO, claimed that the outage was related to Border Gateway Protocol updates. Their function is to exchange information between systems. The configuration changes eventually brought down other properties, eventually taking the entire internal backbone offline.

Downdetector reported that there were 10.6 million problem reports worldwide. Thus, this was the largest Facebook outage.