I’ll explain what happened to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp
On what happened to the social networks of Mark Zuckerberg's group (Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp down for six hours) in practical terms, the communication routing system came under attack. The comment by Umberto Rapetto, director of infosec.news
The collapse of social media headed by Mark Zuckerberg has sent those who cannot communicate without having those platforms into crisis. Scenes of despair with husbands forced to talk to their wives, children forced to exchange a few words with their parents and so to follow in a gruesome collection of situations that were believed to be now buried by technologies.
For over six hours, the polyformed giant of the web remained on the ground, lifeless, motionless despite the resuscitation attempts of technicians and specialists. It is not the first "stroke" that paralyzes Facebook because already in 2009 there were twenty-four terrible hours of blackout, but this time the "perceived" disaster (a bit like with summer temperatures) did not go unnoticed at all.
After the first timid messages of apology to users (communications obviously forwarded through competing solutions and sites), the Facebook headquarters declared that the chaos had been caused by a "configuration problem".
In practical terms, the communications routing system that is based on particular servers on which the correct functioning of the network depends has come under attack. These sophisticated computers manage the "nodes" or – if ever it were a network of roads – the junctions and roundabouts of the path followed by those who want to reach a specific destination.
To get an idea of what happened yesterday (and above all of what could happen more seriously tomorrow for certainly more essential services …) you can try to imagine a gang of criminals who at every intersection (or node) has eliminated signs and indications that allowed to guide users and get them to their favorite social network or use the favorite instant messaging system.
It is not difficult to understand what can happen in real life in such circumstances, but it only takes a moment to realize the danger of a similar attack dynamic applied to that digital universe that has gradually overlapped our daily life, conditioning our habits and making it " normal ”only if everything works perfectly.
The Achilles' heel of the Internet and of all the services that rely on that architecture is the gigantic intertwining of electronic archives in which information resides to recognize the names attributed to network nodes or websites and translate them into the corresponding IP numbers that identify each specific online resource.
Wanting to fantastically design the DNS system in the guise of a vintage switchboard operator, what has happened finds an understandable explanation even for those who lack certain technological knowledge. What happens if the diligent "young lady on the phone" – in response to the precise prompting "please put me in connection with Tizio" – dials a wrong or different number or does not complete the sequence of digits necessary to connect?
Those who do not talk nonsense about football, but prefer to discuss the computerized future, sustainable evolution and cybersecurity, take note of what has happened and get to work.
Next time we will not miss only the usual rain of fake news on Facebook, the hard videos that the missed gynecologists of this or that chat generously dispense via WhatsApp, the photos of food pornography or the retouched selfies conveyed with Instagram.
Seriousness, it takes, not resilience.
Article published on infosec.news
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/facebook-down-vi-spiego-cosa-e-successo-anche-a-instagram-e-whatsapp/ on Tue, 05 Oct 2021 13:52:17 +0000.