Facebook’s giant obscurity is illustrated in 3 questions

A behemoth like Facebook, how almost half of the people on the planet use its services, On Monday, October 4, he suddenly “disappeared from the Internet” ?

It really disappeared: shortly before 6pm, the paths leading to Facebook’s servers on the Internet were equivalent to Michelin’s map and completely destroyed. No Internet user in the world can access all services using Facebook or its infrastructure, primarily Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, all owned by Silicon Fence.

• PGP, What is the Internet “Road Map”?

To understand, you need to look at a little-known protocol for the operation of the Internet: Border Gateway Protocol, Or PGP. This is considered the equivalent of a large joint road map or Internet GPS: it allows you to determine the best way to get to point B (your smartphone or your computer, for example) at point B at any time. Here, Facebook).

This is explained by the nature of the Internet, which has millions of servers and networks (major social networks such as Orange, content providers such as Facebook, Netflix, etc.) interconnected and vastly set up. Site. To guide web users, all of these players share a large aggregate map, which is responsible for constantly updating, allowing data to be routed over the larger web.

• Why do we hear about “DNS”?

The first error message stated that there was a problem with the domain name settings (“Domain Name Systems” or DNS). A domain name (for example, “www.facebook.com”) made up of DNS stock characters must be translated into an IP (Internet Protocol) address, i.e. technical and unique identifier. In order for a server on the network (for example, “216.239.32.107”) to be understood by a machine. It allows you to connect randomly with your favorite site www.lemonde.fr, Without memorizing the difficult sequence of digits associated with its address. Like a directory, with a person’s name, allowing you to find his mailing address to visit.

Provided only once with this IP address, the smartphone or computer that wants to connect to a site can find the relevant server with PGP and display the contents (a message, a social network, a video …) Cloudflare summarizes it, A company that specializes in Internet infrastructure, tells where DNS should go and how PGP should go.

The DNS tells us where to go and the PGP tells us how

To use DNS, you need to know how to get there, just like any other type of server. However, without PGP, finding one’s way is precisely impossible. To use the phone book metaphor, the phone book is not in your home, but as if it were in a friend’s home. Without PGP, it is already impossible to use the information provided by the directory, but it is also impossible to view it.

• What triggered the crash first?

We don’t know yet. The chain of events at this point is not yet fully known, but just before 6pm on Monday, Facebook did a PGP update (“joint map”) explaining that some of the paths leading to its DNS are no longer valid. Reaching these servers was suddenly very difficult, and it was blocked Most links. Facebook announced that it could not use all the computer paths leading to its servers, effectively disconnecting from the rest of the Internet.

As is often the case with problems involving DNS and PGP technologies, the source of the error is often human. As a witness The first blog post published on Monday evening, Facebook is very sensible at the moment about the exact details that led to this unprecedented crash. By his side, Mark Zuckerberg He said to himself “Sorry” This interruption.

Still, the effects of this failure on Facebook services were felt across the network. The decline in Internet traffic handled by Facebook was immediately noticed by various tracking services.

The Facebook crash will now last 3 hours +. https://t.co/oEooqoAxhG https://t.co/eU0gfUjDSl

– DougMadory (ouDoug Madory)