Days after the terrible outage that troubled Facebook users globally, Instagram users had to suffer once again as the platform went down. Facebook confirmed that the second outage also affected other services besides Instagram.
Instagram Went Down Again
Right after Facebook reached a complete restoration of services after the global outage, Instagram services went offline.
Specifically, Instagram services went down around 16.00 GMT on October 8, 2021, and remained inaccessible for more than an hour.
Whereas some other users also complained about the unavailability of Facebook and WhatsApp as well. This chaotic situation continued for a few hours.
Nonetheless, this wasn’t as global an outage as the previous one. Instead, the services had an intermittent availability in different regions randomly.
Facebook confirmed the situation via an official tweet shortly after users faced problems. However, this time, the tech giant didn’t share many details about what had happened (until writing this article).
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 8, 2021
Soon after, Facebook fixed the glitch while announcing it (via a tweet). However, they still didn’t explain the reason behind the glitch.
We’re so sorry if you weren’t able to access our products during the last couple of hours. We know how much you depend on us to communicate with one another. We fixed the issue — thanks again for your patience this week.
— Facebook (@Facebook) October 8, 2021
Nonetheless, users continued to face problems even after this fix, as evident from their responses.
You haven't fixed it I still can't log onto some of the games via my phone
— Ian Cole (@IanCole47130800) October 8, 2021
FIX MY MARKETPLACE
— Jeff. (@immymustafa94) October 8, 2021
WhatsApp still down.
— MARGARET SNATCHER (@OLDGRUMPYGRANNY) October 8, 2021
It's still not working. Fix it.
— black.lives.matter (@CandaceNaude) October 9, 2021
More Details About The Previous Outage
While Facebook hasn’t elaborated on the latest glitch, it explained the previous global outage.
Sharing “more details” in a subsequent blog post, Santosh Janardhan, VP Infrastructure at Facebook, explained how the disruption happened during a routine maintenance activity.
During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally.
It then resulted in a cascade reaction rendering their systems unreachable over the internet.
One of the jobs performed by our smaller facilities is to respond to DNS queries… To ensure reliable operation, our DNS servers disable those BGP advertisements if they themselves cannot speak to our data centers, since this is an indication of an unhealthy network connection. In the recent outage the entire backbone was removed from operation, making these locations declare themselves unhealthy and withdraw those BGP advertisements.
This is in line with what the researchers explained earlier when the outage happened. Facebook also confirmed that the outage caused difficulties for its staff to reach the data centers physically.
Given this description, it seems the recent disruption may also have occurred as an aftermath of this technical chaos.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58850041
