DNS failure resulted Facebook suffer largest outage of Seven hours

We live in a collaborative and interactive world which brings endless possibilities. Mobile operators form the pillars of a connected and efficient world. There are zillion advantages of being connected. Each of those nameservers is covered by a different IP prefix, or Internet “route”, covering a range of IP addresses. At approximately 15:40 UTC, Facebook’s service started to go offline, as users were unable to resolve its domains to IP addresses through the DNS.

The Facebook suite collapsed like a house of cards on Monday which led to the Great Social Media Blackout of 2021 for 6 hours. One thing to keep in mind is that such things do happen in the tech world and it cannot be avoided. However, the impact could have been minimized or eliminated to a large extent. Facebook ran three different apps from one centralized infrastructure. To top it all, it was a single point of failure for users worldwide. If things go wrong, users across the world are impacted. Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth fell by more than $7 billion in a few hours.

This outage demonstrates the risks of the whole Internet being dependent on one company and this could have been minimized. We don’t want this situation to arise again. A possible solution to this is to segregate infrastructure by country/region so that the impact in case of failure is minimized/localized. It also helps respect the local data laws of that particular country/region. From a user’s perspective, we need to have alternatives available.

It is not good for the entire world to be dependent on apps from one single company. Especially when communicating, business transactions are dependent on them. Lack of access to the network management system would certainly have prevented Facebook from rolling back any faulty changes. Access could have been due to some network change that was part of the original route withdrawals that precipitated the outage, or it could have been due to a service dependency . Likewise, if their internal DNS was a dependency for access to an authentication service or other key system.