In recent years, Facebook has not only been criticized, but has been sued for inappropriate practices, ranging from privacy breaches to monopoly business practices not to mention harmful work cultures.
From time to time there have been repeatedcalls to boycott Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp services. But despite the negative publicity, Facebook still has a firm grip on people's lives, as confirmed yesterday by the hours-long vacation which not only affected the members of the larger social network but also all of them businesses who use company services.
For almost six hours, the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had fallen, worldwide. Although it was not as serious an incident as the one in 2019 that left users off Facebook for more than a day, the last outage was more extensive and to some extent, very strange.
Facebook posted a official announcement about what exactly happened and, fortunately, there was no security breach. The company assures that none were breached service of during this interruption.
Eventually, a simple but extremely harmful configuration excluded not only Facebook users, but even company employees, virtually and physically.
At the heart of the problem was Border Gateway Protocol or the BGP that Facebook refers to as the backbone that coordinates network traffic between its data centers.
The wrong change in a setting not only affected users' access to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, but also how Facebook employees accessed the company's buildings. So the problem could not be fixed quickly.
And while the company has begun to recover from the outage, Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, publicly apologized for the disruption.