Explainer: Facebook, WhatsApp, Insta shut for 6 hours, what exactly happened ? [TKB Tech]

Monday around 15:30 UTC hours proved to be heavy for social media users. Because lately the services of Facebook and its affiliates social sites were down. According to media around 3.5 billion users have been affected worldwide due to the downing of Facebook’s services. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for this. After about 6 hours, the services have resumed around the world.

What happened exactly?

On Monday, users around the world reported problems using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. While only buffering was happening in opening Facebook, the feed was not getting refreshed on Insta. Whereas, messages were not being sent from WhatsApp and Messenger. After the server down of social media the hashtags like #Instgramdown and #WhatsAppDown started trending on Twitter. According to the news agency Reuters, on Monday, the use of Twitter was much higher than on normal days. It is believed that this was probably the first time that Facebook’s services were down for so long.

But how did this happened?

Facebook has apologized but has not told how this problem happened? Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer informed about the resumption of Facebook by tweeting at around 10:16 pm UTC. However, he also said that it may take time to start 100%.

Several Facebook employees told news agency Reuters on condition of anonymity that the problem was caused by an internal mistake in how Internet traffic is routed through its system. The employees said that the problem was further aggravated due to the failure of internal communication tools and other resources dependent on the same network.

No reason has been revealed so far behind the services being down, but tech experts speculate that it could also be due to a flaw in the domain name system i.e. DNS in Facebook. DNS is in a way the backbone of the Internet. When you open a website in your computer, DNS tells your browser what is the IP of any website is. Every website has an IP. In the case of Twitter or Facebook, DNS tells your browser what is the IP of Twitter and Facebook. In such a situation, if the records of Facebook and Twitter are erased from the DNS database, then you and your computer will not be able to know what Facebook and Twitter are and will not be able to access them.

What effect did this leave on Facebook?

As soon as the news of Facebook’s services down on Monday, Facebook’s share price started declining. During this, the share price of Facebook fell by 5%. However, after the resumption of services, its share price has started rising again.

At the same time, Standard Media Index, a firm working on advertising, said that after Google, Facebook is the world’s largest online ad seller. Facebook is estimated to suffer a loss of nearly about $ 5.45 million every hour due to the services being down. However, it is also that ad revenue growth will not be affected for long.