The first hypotheses about the fall of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram and the effects on third parti

With the failure of Facebook services, not only its users suffer, but also the rest of Internet users who hope to connect to other types of platforms on the web for their business

Around 3:30 p.m. (UTC), a total fall of Facebook Inc. was reported that resulted in a general failure in the servers of this company and that directly affected applications such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Oculus and of course its main app, Facebook.

Also, people who tried to obtain some information related to this cyber chaos ran into a wall when they realized that the official news pages or blogs of the company are also out of service. In short, this October 4 Facebook and everything related to this company was affected.

However, the most worrisome thing is not only that social networks collapse but that they remain in that state for so long, because at the time of writing this article, the problem still persisted with messages not sent, images not loaded and “missing” web domains.

Why the failure of Facebook services?

Since users made the downfall of Facebook and its affiliated applications evident, the only official statement that has come out of the company is based on an apology and a message of encouragement in which the company claims to be working on the problem.

“We are aware that some people have problems accessing our applications and products. We are working so that everything returns to normal as soon as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience, “said Facebook through a publication on its Twitter account.

Consequently, the only versions available about what could have happened within Facebook’s servers are based on the statements of experts on the subject, although of course, they can only be taken as hypotheses within this situation.

One of the authorized voices in this type of cyber scenario is Brian Krebs, an expert cybersecurity reporter , who assured on Twitter that the problem can only be one: conflicts between DNS records and Facebook domains. According to Krebs, the failures that caused the internet giant’s services to crash are based on the disappearance of BGP routes, a protocol that allows DNS records to spread throughout the internet.

This protocol is used so that the IP of each device can be translated into perfectly readable codes by the DNS and thus, successfully complete the connection between Facebook and its users’ devices.

In short, when a person uses a cell phone, tablet or computer, this device requests access to Facebook, either to its main platform or to its other social networks, which is denied by the DNS that simply cannot translate the alpha format. (for example facebook.com) to a numeric one that is the one that can finally be read by the servers on the internet .

“We do not know why this change was made. It could well have been the result of an internal system change / update gone wrong. Everything is speculation at the moment: (you can only know) that Facebook is the only one that controls its DNS records, “Krebs said.

How does the fall of Facebook affect the rest of the web?

Now, the failure to translate Facebook’s DNS with the IPs of its users not only affects this group on the internet. Facebook is so big that its problems translate into crashes and slowdowns for the rest of the network.

The need for people to see Facebook functional means that each time they press “enter” the DNS traffic is overloaded, which, in the absence of a valid web domain, causes many other non-Facebook searches to be performed much more slow.

“Cloudflare runs a free DNS server, 1.1.1.1, and a lot of people use it. So, Facebook goes down and… guess what happens? That people keep trying to access. The software keeps trying to access. And we were hit by a huge flood of traffic asking for facebook.com ”, is the example given by John Graham-Cumming, CTO of Cloudflare, a free proxy system on the internet.

In summary, this situation can be analyzed as follows:

Facebook is a famous person who lives in a building and it is precisely because of its popularity that many people decide to go visit it while saturating the cytophone (telephone in the building) that would act as the Internet DNS. Thus, by not answering, the followers of this famous person try to contact him one, two and even a thousand times, which means that no one else can use the phone to communicate with another neighbor in the building.