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Facebook—and apparently all the major services Facebook owns—are down today. We first noticed the problem at about 11:30 am Eastern time, when some Facebook links stopped working. Investigating a bit further showed major DNS failures at Facebook:
DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service which translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn’t know how to get to the servers that host the website you’re looking for.
The problem goes deeper than Facebook’s obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook’s own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 (no server is available for the request) failures instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services’ load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.
BGP routes for Facebook had been pulled. (BGP—short for Border Gateway Protocol—is the system by which one network figures out the best route to a different network.)
With no BGP routes into Facebook’s network, Facebook’s own DNS servers would be unreachable—as would the missing application servers for Facebook-owned Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR.
. @Facebook DNS and other services are down. It appears their BGP routes have been withdrawn from the internet. @Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 started seeing high failure in last 20mins.
— Dane Knecht (@dok2001) October 4, 2021
If the BGP routes for a given network are missing or incorrect, nobody outside that network can find it.
Not long after that, Reddit user u/ramenporn reported on the r/sysadmin subreddit that BGP peering with Facebook is down, probably due to a configuration change that was pushed shortly before the outages began.
According to u/ramenporn—who claims to be a Facebook employee and part of the recovery efforts—this is most likely a case of Facebook network engineers pushing a config change that inadvertently locked them out, meaning that the fix must come from data center technicians with local, physical access to the routers in question. The withdrawn routes do not appear to be the result of nor related to any malicious attack on Facebook’s infrastructure.
