The closure of Facebook, which affected all of its services, including WhatsApp and Instagram, resulted in a personal loss of nearly ً 7 billion to chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
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| Mark Zuckerberg apologizes to users for shutting down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on October 4, 2021 |
The major social media platform Facebook has said that the biggest shutdown in Facebook's history was due to a wrong command and that "the mistake was made by us."
Facebook said in a new post on Tuesday that "we have done a lot to strengthen our system to prevent unauthorized access and it is interesting to note that when we acted maliciously How did the process of strengthening the system slow us down when we tried to get out of the blockade caused by our own mistakes?
In his post, Santosh Janardhan, Vice President of Fees Engineering and Infrastructure, explains why and how Facebook was shut down for six hours and what technical, physical and security difficulties the company's engineers face in restoring it. Had to
According to Janardhan, the main reason for the closure of Facebook was the wrong command given during the normal maintenance process.
Facebook engineers have been forced to gain practical access to the data centres that create the 'global backbone network' and remove barriers to correcting errors caused by incorrect commands. ۔
However, once the error was corrected, another difficulty that the engineers encountered was in the form of handling the 'increase in traffic' that arises during troubleshooting.
In his post, Janardhan explains how "the system that handles our global backbone network capacity" has gone awry.
According to the post: 'Backbone is the network that Fees has set up to connect all its computer installations. The network consists of thousands of miles of fibber optic cables that span the globe and connect all of our data centres.
All requests from Facebook users, including uploading news or accessing messages, are handled through the same network that sees requests from smaller data centres. To manage these data centers efficiently, engineers maintain infrastructure on a daily basis, including offlineing a portion of the 'backbone', increasing capacity, or updating the software of these routers, all of which Handle data traffic.
According to Janardhan: That was the reason for yesterday's closure.
He added: "A command was issued with the intention of reviewing the availability of global backbone capacity during their routine maintenance operations, which inadvertently disconnected all connections to our backbone network and Facebook's connection to global data centres was effectively cut off.
Janardhan's post said that what complicated matters was that it was not possible to analyse the command given by mistake which shut down Facebook because the error found in the company's analysis system was incorrect. Obstructed the system to intercept the command.
After that, the connection between Facebook's data centres and the Internet was completely cut off. "It's something that caused another problem that made things worse."
Facebook's entire 'backbone' stopped working, leading data centre sites to declare themselves 'unhealthy'.
According to the post, "The end result was that access to our DNS services (domain name systems) became impossible even though they were still working."
Domain Name Systems (DNS) are systems through which web pages that users type are converted into Internet Protocol (IP) that computers can understand. "This situation has made it impossible for the rest of the Internet to find our servers."
Janardhan said the situation posed two challenges. The first was that Facebook's engineers were unable to access data centres from normal sources due to network disruptions.
Second, the company's Internet tools, which it commonly uses to solve these problems, are "broken."
Engineers were forced to visit the data center on the spot where they had to "find the problem and restart the systems."
However, this does not prove that the task is easy because Facebook's data centres have solid physical and other security. This security system is designed to be "difficult to access."
Janardhan points out how the company's routers and hardware are designed to be difficult to change despite practical access.
"So extra time was needed to activate the secure access protocols that were needed to get people to the site and make them work on the servers," he said. Only then were we able to confirm the problem and get our backbone back online. "
Engineers then faced one last problem, which was that they could not easily restore access to all users around the world as the system stopped working again due to increased traffic. Resolving the issue of massive reduction in energy consumption by data centres could "endanger everything from electrical systems to memories."
The post said the company had previously conducted a drill called "Storm Drills", which means they know how to get the system back online gradually and safely.
Finally, Janardhan said, "I believe that such a balance is valuable. On a daily basis, the toughest security versus the slowest solution to such a unique problem as this one.
Facebook's shutdown, which affected all of its services, including WhatsApp and Instagram, resulted in a personal loss of nearly ً 7 billion to chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. The company's shares fell in the stock market. Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for the inconvenience caused to users by the closure of Facebook.
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