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”. In an apologetic blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, said that “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication”.įacebook explained Tuesday the outage was “caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making.” Can you explain that in plain English? –Ĭyber experts think the problem boils down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol - the system the internet uses to pick the quickest route to move packets of information around. Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world’s reliance on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant.īut what actually caused the outage? What does Facebook say happened? This file photo taken on October 5, 2020, shows logos of US social networks Facebook, Instagram and mobile messaging service WhatsApp on the screens of a smartphone and a tablet in Toulouse, southwestern France.

Why is instagram and whatsapp down