Facebook blackout: the official explanation arrives

According to the official explanation of the site, the blackout that blocked for more than seven hours Facebook and all related services, such as Instagram e WhatsApp, hit the social servers during the proceedings of ordinary maintenance. We remind you that the failure led to DNS error, which removed social media from the web until the intervention in its Data Center in California.

The Facebook blackout: here is the official explanation

To explain it, in a post on the official blog of Facebook engineers, is Santosh Janardhan, vice president of the group, who writes: “The data traffic between all the IT structures of Facebook is managed by routers, which determine where to direct the incoming and outgoing data. In the extensive daily maintenance work, our engineers often need to take part of the backbone offline, for example when repairing a fiber line, adding bandwidth capacity or updating router software ”.

The problem would therefore have emerged during one of the management activities, when a command was issued to assess the strength of the social network infrastructure. At this point an error in the system, It is unclear if one can properly speak of a bug, it prevented Facebook’s data centers from being immediately restored globally, leaving them offline for hours.

The first disconnection then created others in a chain, like in a domino. “Everything happened very quickly – explains Santosh – and while our engineers worked to understand what was happening, they had to face the impossibility of accessing the data centers by normal means, because the networks did not work, and the unavailability of tools. that we normally use to investigate blackouts “.

Fortunately Facebook is prepared for such critical scenarios, thanks to the ‘storm’ exercises, which simulate a serious system failure, which allowed for timely intervention by the technicians.