#FacebookDown — It's the end of the F* world!
Henrique Jorge
Founder of ETER9, an avant-garde and experimental AI-driven social network designed to extend human presence beyond the constraints of time and availability, where each user is paired with a unique counterpart.
Planet Earth underwent a test this week with the disappearance of the Facebook network group from the map.
It was about six hours of a world without Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The negative impact on the group is profound and will undoubtedly force a rethinking of the three networks' integration strategy.
There is a saying that putting all the eggs in the same basket is not correct. With this blackout, that thought should be evident in Mark Zuckerberg's mind, or not! It's also on the minds of everyone who professionally depended on the Facebook network.
The Internet isn't just Facebook!
But what happened after all? However advanced it is, the technology has flaws, either by human error or "defect" of the technology itself.
As is well known, the Internet is a vast network of networks. There is the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to unite them, analyzing and choosing the best routes to send the data. BGP lists the networks for the other networks after being identified by themselves. It's an external routing protocol responsible for connecting the networks that make up the Internet.
After performing erroneous configurations on the routers of their data centers, Facebook became invisible to the BGP protocol, thus being ignored by the providers, as it was as if the Facebook network didn't exist.
As a direct consequence, the Domain Name Systems (DNS) worldwide have stopped converting the domain names of Facebook and subsequent networks connected by misconfigured BGP. Thus, the ripple effect generated a giant wave of additional DNS traffic, as applications and other systems tried in vain to repeatedly reach Facebook domains and the most Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users.
The DNS systems worldwide were then forced to handle a volume of queries 30 times greater than usual, thus causing latency and instability issues on other platforms.
Facebook will have learned its lesson, but so will we. Do not create dependent systems on others without having alternative methods.
Imagine what it would be like if hospitals adopted life support systems dependent on Facebook networks, and these failed to function as they did this week.
The good thing about all this is that the world has had the opportunity to experience a Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp detox.
Although minimal, this detox offered a glimpse of a world without some digital toxicity.
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