This is how the global Facebook crash on October 4 affected the Internet

Yesterday, October 4, there was a global Facebook crash, and with it all its attached services fell. These were WhatsApp and Instagram, so the fall was not only on the web, but on the entire ecosystem and those who depend to some extent on their services such as identification by account or their advertising platform.

The fall of Facebook yesterday made us think about the need to decentralize our enormous dependence on a single website that houses a large part of the world's internet traffic. Directly or indirectly, the losses related to this six-hour drop can be estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars, and one has been affected by little use of Facebook's servers for any part of his business.

What happened to the fall of Facebook?

Facebook and all its services were down on October 4, 2021 for almost 7 hours due to an internal error. This error deleted their domains and subdomains from the BGP tables during what must have been a routine update. This caused first that they could not communicate between the data centers of Facebook itself, and then that the routing errors spread abroad, which caused said drop in services.

Simply put, Facebook had a routing problem and its domains could not be solved so if you entered its address or called any element within its ecosystem, it would not work. They essentially cut themselves off from the internet and couldn't do anything except physically go to their servers to fix them in person.

Since Facebook has its Instagram and WhatsApp services on its servers, if one goes down, they all go down. This is why the fall has had so many effects and has been noticed in numerous day-to-day or business situations.

What is BGP and what does Facebook have to do with it?

BGP is a distributed system whereby large Internet operators, or large companies that can afford to operate their own networks, share Internet addresses or autonomous systems. Having a BGP routing problem, Facebook erased its data from the rest of the networks and disappeared from the Internet temporarily.

The re-routing of connection requests that were lost due to the Facebook crash also affected the worldwide DNS system. Connections slowed as smartphones and computers around the world repeated and repeated calls and had to be redirected.

Facebook's global crash demonstrated the danger of the Internet of Things

Internet of Things is a concept that is widely used to refer to when control services are installed through applications and connections to a server. Home automation is a topic that has fascinated technology lovers who think of numerous ways to improve the quality of life of users through Internet services.

But over time, the Internet of Things has come under a lot of criticism due to the dependence of many devices on the Internet to function, with operation via the Internet being the only form of control or validation. There is a derogatory term for this, and it is the “Internet of Shit” and it is often referred to when an application fails and does not connect, or when an update is needed for an appliance that did not originally need it, or when the service stops working forever and the device is a huge paperweight.

In this case of the global fall of Facebook, it even affected themselves on a physical level. Facebook employee ID cards work through the same server they are hosted on, and if the server is down, the cards cannot work. They also couldn't use internal communications. In this way, Facebook suffered in its own flesh the Internet of Shit.

With the enormous proliferation of home automation coupled with Amazon's Alexa services, or Chromebooks that depend on Google services, it makes one wonder what options will be left for these devices as soon as they decide that supporting them does not benefit them. An example of them is that of the PSP Go, the fully digital version of the console that today cannot access the game store, and the Xbox series S and the PlayStation 5 All Digital run the same danger, to say the least. consumer devices that depend entirely on connection to third-party servers.

The damages of the fall of Facebook

The internal impact of the economic downturn is difficult to calculate. Facebook has been with lawsuits and accusations for years of not complying with laws on the use of its users' data and their privacy, and this blackout has renewed criticism. During the blackout, Facebook shares fell about 5%, which is several hundred million dollars in market value. This is because too many elements of the world depend on Facebook and its system, so there is a high risk that if an error enters, hundreds of thousands of external services will suffer problems.

Starting with all the companies and public services that mainly use WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram to advertise and even launch official communications to their customers and citizens, there are other social networks and media such as Twitter, Telegram or TikTok. The fall of Facebook demonstrates the need to distribute the lines of communication between users and communicators in the event that any of these need to use social networks for their communications. And this is just one of the examples.

There is also a huge external impact. The fall has caused isolation among users who mostly use WhatsApp to have conversations at their own pace without having to spend SMS or count the characters., There are many businesses that depend on Instagram or Facebook to get customers through advertising and their publications, with what the fall has left them without their main commercial showcase. It is estimated that Facebook has been able to lose between 60 and 100 million dollars but for external businesses that used Instagram or Facebook to promote themselves and WhatsApp as a form of communication, the losses are much greater.

This global downfall of Facebook is an example of the need for numerous avenues of communication, and promotion, and the risks of excessive centralization. But at the same time, it is almost impossible to get out of the position of dominance and influence that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have.