Facebook reveals the reason for the disruption of its services for 3.5 billion users

Weather of Arabia - There were various interpretations related to the malfunction that caused, on Monday, 3.5 billion users to be deprived for several hours of accessing the sites "Facebook", "Instagram" and "WhatsApp", but the company "Facebook" revealed in a statement that wrong modifications in the settings are the main reason. Behind the malfunction, it confirmed that no user data had been compromised.

And she added, "Our engineering teams discovered that modifications to the main routers that coordinate traffic between data centers caused problems that led to communication interruption," according to "Reuters".

Details of the technical reason behind the failure of the platforms

Facebook and its platforms WhatsApp and Instagram were all down, their DNS was down, and their IP addresses could not be accessed. It was as if someone "pulled cables" from data centers at once and disconnected them from the Internet.

How could this happen?

BGP Updates

BGP stands for Border Gateway Protocol, the service responsible for searching all available paths along which data can travel, and choosing the best one, a mechanism for exchanging routing information between Autonomous Systems (AS) on the Internet.

Large routers have huge and constantly updated lists of potential methods that can be used to deliver each data packet to its final destination, and without BGP, routers will not know what to do, and the Internet will not work.

The Internet is a network linked together by a BGP, whereby BGP allows one network (such as Facebook) to announce its existence to the other networks that make up the Internet.