As you are probably aware, all of Facebook’s sites were down yesterday, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Many theories were put forth including DDoS attacks to a massive data breach, and it was strange timing immediately following a 60 Minutes interview with a whistleblower on internal Facebook investigations. However, Facebook has come forward and said that it was all due to a faulty router configuration.
The routers affected normally coordinated network traffic between Facebook data centers, and when they failed it led to a cascading failure. All of this led to massive border gateway protocol and DNS issues, rendering every Facebook online property inaccessible for over six hours.
