The Fall of Facebook: Cyber Attack or Internal Fault?
It hasn't been more than 6 hours since the first reports of Facebook's failures began. Officially, we are facing the largest service decline in its history, it could have had failures at some point, but now it is taking over many services. This is why it is more evident, with WhatsApp and Instagram affected.
That is why the most serious investigations in this regard have already begun, at first they were considered something temporary. But basically all the lines of communication broke down, so the questions began.
logistical problems
The first thing that is heard comes from FB employees who are chatting with friends. New York Times reporter Shira Frenkel revealed that FB employees cannot enter the buildings. The decline in services also affected their internal systems, which is why ID cards are rendered useless and there are not many doors that require them.
Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.
— Sheera Frenkel (@sheeraf) October 4, 2021
This already gives us an idea of the scale of the error, and if that wasn't enough, Brian Krebs has confirmed something worse. The DNS records for Facebook and Instagram are gone, and most likely they can be restored, but the fact is that only FB has access to this DNS
Confirmed: The DNS records that tell systems how to find https://t.co/qHzVq2Mr4E or https://t.co/JoIPxXI9GI got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables. Can you imagine working at FB right now, when your email no longer works & all your internal FB-based tools fail?
— briankrebs (@briankrebs) October 4, 2021
Missing DNS records
This means that there was a fatal error in the last configuration of your servers or a major update went wrong. Users are already starting to speculate and many are pointing out that pinging Facebook domains does not lead to any kind of response.
When a website isn't working, the answer is usually "site down," or it's down. However, the answer now is that such a field does not exist. This is related to what was reported by Krebs, Facebook's DNS has been pulled, so it is not present at the moment for practical purposes.
There are also many rumors, and the rumors that have gained more traction are those of the alleged Facebook employee who used Reddit to describe what was happening. However, the account has been deleted, so you should take this information with caution
Facebook has sent a team to one of its California data centers to try to manually reset its servers - NYT
— BNO News (@BNONews) October 4, 2021
The need to reconfigure
What "Ramenporn" said in his post confirms what Krebs said, adding that people who can reset routing table settings should go to a specific location. But at the moment they do not have access to those offices with configurable routers, although it was not revealed why this logistical problem is due.
What the anonymous user said was also confirmed by the latest BNO News report where Facebook allegedly sent a team to actually show up in California and fix the issue.
We can see what are called routing tables as directions to follow when we are driving on a highway. These documents indicate all the paths within the network that can be followed to reach a connection to a web page or service. This way, services like Facebook or Amazon have huge routing tables to be fully available worldwide.
When routing tables are dropped, as in the case of Facebook, browsers and clients generally have no way of knowing which way to connect. In this sense, the services are isolated and there is no way to access them until the table configurations are restored.
In any case, there are already many sources that confirm that it is about Facebook's DNS records, as we said, only FB has access to these records. So it is very unlikely that there was an alleged hacker attack, and this was in fact all due to a fault on the part of a work group affiliated with the company.
Source : tekcrispy