The knock-on effects of the shutdown included some Facebook employees being unable to even enter their buildings because their security badges no longer worked, further slowing the response. 'That streamlines things on a daily basis - but because everything is in the same place, when that place has a problem, nothing works.' 'For security reasons, Facebook has had to very strongly concentrate its infrastructure,' he said. READ | Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp hit by global outage.

'Normally it's good not to put all your eggs in one basket,' said Pierre Bonis of AFNIC, the association that manages domain names in France. Why did it take so long to fix the problem?Įxperts say Facebook's technical infrastructure is unusually reliant on its own systems - and that proved disastrous on Monday.Īfter Facebook sent the fateful routing update, its engineers got locked out of the system that would allow them to communicate that the update had, in fact, been an error. It's not yet clear how or why, but Facebook's routers essentially sent a message to the internet announcing that the company's servers no longer existed. In the same way that air traffic controllers sometimes make changes to flight schedules, 'Facebook did an update of these routes,' Slim said.īut this update contained a crucial error.

Sami Slim of data centre company Telehouse compared BGP to 'the internet equivalent of air traffic control'. Cyber experts think the problem boils down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Patrol - the system the internet uses to pick the quickest route to move packets of information around.

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