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Down of the social networks of Mark Zuckerberg’s reign. Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook offline not only in Italy, disruptions scattered all over the world.

Yesterday afternoon around 5.37 pm (approximately) the “oldest” social network of all did not allow access to users and after a few minutes also the instant messaging app Whatsapp and the social network for photography enthusiasts
Instagram
.
It only took a few minutes to send the world literally into a tailspin, in fact as soon as the malfunctions began all the users of the three social networks rushed to Twitter to report the discomfort with the hashtags #Facebookdown, #Instagramdown and #WhatsAppdown.

About 7 hours of blackout, a collapse like this had never happened before, in fact the last outage that had affected the three apps of Mark Zuckerberg’s ecosystem dated back to last March 19 and the one even before July 3, 2019. Last March’s downtime lasted only 45 minutes.

According to an official statement, the blackout was caused by configuration changes to the routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers. “This disruption to network traffic has had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

These are the statements from a
Twitter
post by Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan.

This error prevented all Internet users from connecting to
Facebook’s
servers, because it was not possible to locate the maps that would allow them to trace the route to the Facebook address.
The error caused the BGP routes that allow access to Facebook’s authoritative DNS servers to be abruptly deleted, which is why Facebook’s DNS started to become unresponsive.

In technical terms, the configuration error made Facebook’s BGP peering routers, the company’s computers that manage BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), which is the Internet protocol that determines the routing of data to be transmitted, inaccessible remotely.

According to Il Messaggero, to resolve the issue, Facebook has sent a team to Santa Clara to manually reset the servers. But the mistake also affected the company’s own employees: it seems that
even internal services such as emails did not work
, because they were all connected to the Facebook.com domain which was obviously unreachable. Same problem for employee badges, because the office locks would be connected to access to Facebook’s servers.

A difficult start to the week for the CEO of Facebook, in just 8 hours Facebook’s stock fell by almost 5.7%, also thanks to the revelations of a former manager to the
Wall Street Journal
and after his interview on the
television program 60 Minutes of the US channel CBS.
Frances Haugen has revealed information useful for embarking on a series of Facebook investigations published by the Wall Street Journal.
According to reports, the team of the social network would have prioritized profits over the fight against misinformation, and would have been aware of the potential negative effects that this choice would have on people’s mental health.
To conclude and give the news of the restart of the servers and it was Zuckerberg himself with a post on his social network “Sorry for the interruption, we know how many people rely on our services to stay connected”.