March 5, 2024
Users of social networks in Ukraine reported a major failure in the work of social networks Facebook and Instagram. The same complaints are made in many other countries of the world.
Meta later commented on the failure.
“We are aware of a problem affecting Facebook login. Our engineering teams are actively trying to solve the problem as soon as possible,” the message reads.
An hour following the failure, Meta services began to gradually recover. Facebook and Facebook Messenger were the first to work, and to restore them, you had to log in once more.
After 7 p.m., Instagram started working in Kyiv.
What happened?
Around 5 p.m. Kyiv time, the Meta company’s programs stopped working on all devices. It was not possible to log into my account once more on desktops or on phones in applications. The Facebook messenger did not work either.
On some mobile devices, it was possible to open applications, but the news feed was not updated and it was impossible to make a post or any other action.
The outage also extended to the Threads sharing platform, a new X-like Meta app that launched last year.
This is a global problem in the operation of the platform – many countries were affected by the failure.
The Downdetector resource, which records user complaints regarding the operation of Internet resources, showed a significant number of complaints regarding Facebook and Instagram.
In less than 10 minutes, more than 200,000 messages regarding interruptions in the work of Facebook and more than 45,000 – Instagram were received there. And these numbers are constantly growing.
Some Ukrainian officials reported in their Telegram channels regarding a major malfunction of social networks.
Photo by Facebook
Meta’s communications manager posted a message on the X platform regarding problems with the systems.
Users reacted with humor.
“It’s so funny that you’re telling us through another platform that it’s your competitor and it’s ruining the Meta,” wrote one contributor.
Photo courtesy of Twitter
Photo Caption,
Message from Meta Communications Manager on Platform X
Crash of 2021
A similar platform failure occurred in October 2021.
Then billions of users lost access to Facebook and other company platforms: Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger for almost six hours.
Even the company’s internal systems were affected: employees might not get into the offices due to a disabled pass system and use the Workplace communication platform.
The American network services company Cloudflare explained that the failure occurred due to the peculiarities of Internet protocols. This applies to two key components of the Internet: the Domain Name System (DNS) and the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).
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“The Internet is a lot of connected networks. A lot. So that means, to keep order, you need something like BGP to tell you where to go. DNS is basically an address system for each website’s location—its by an IP address. And BGP is a road map that finds the most efficient way to reach this IP address,” the experts explained.
Facebook, through a series of updates, has effectively told BGP that these paths to the platform no longer exist, as well as to the company’s other services.
