What caused the 6-hour-long FB, WhatsApp outage?

Hyderabad: Millions of social media users’ lives came to standstill on Monday as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger faced a six-hour-long outage. The outage that began on Monday evening in India impacted all the users of the social media and its allied platform worldwide. According to an official note from Facebook on Monday, the root […]

Hyderabad: Millions of social media users’ lives came to standstill on Monday as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger faced a six-hour-long outage. The outage that began on Monday evening in India impacted all the users of the social media and its allied platform worldwide.

According to an official note from Facebook on Monday, the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change and it had no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also apologized to all users impacted by the outage and WhatsApp in a tweet said it was back to running at 100 per cent. “Thank you to everyone around the world today for your patience while our teams worked diligently to restore WhatsApp. We truly appreciate you and continue to be humbled by how much people and organizations rely on our app every day,” the company said in the tweet.

Cause of outage

However, cybercrime experts believe that there is a possibility that the outage could have been due to BGP or DNS protocol. While Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the postal service of the Internet, the Domain Network System (DNS) protocol helps Internet users and network devices discover websites using human-readable hostnames, instead of numeric IP addresses.

According to Acronis V-P of Cyber Protection Research Candid Wuest said that there is no confirmation on the cause of the incident but put the possibility with the BGP or DNS protocol – which happen to be popular targets among cyber criminals. He said that while they are a lot less popular than common malware and ransomware attacks, they can be extremely devastating if successful in a sophisticated attack.

“It is like pulling the electric cable to your server room – the whole enterprise suddenly goes dark. To be fair, we must note that most commonly such outages are caused by non-malicious actions – suspect it to be the case here too,” Wuest said.

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