In an attempt to make it easier for users to sign up to systems and not have to remember reams of usernames and passwords, many platforms offer the ability to log in using a Google or Facebook account. “It shows how they hold a disproportionate sway over how the whole thing operates and functions, such that when they malfunction, it’s not even like an ISP going down where the customers go down – it affects the rest of the internet.”įor example, there were issues for services that rely on Facebook for part of their operations. “You get these cascading effects,” continues Woodward. What does this tell us about Facebook’s dominance? This reveals how Facebook itself is hostage to fortune.

“It looks like they had to physically go where the server was and log in manually there and set it back to where it was before,” says Woodward. Why did it take so long to fix?Ī big issue was that Facebook employees reportedly struggled to access their own buildings and networks because they also run on Facebook servers – which didn’t exist in the eyes of the infrastructure running the internet. Technology follows the instructions we provide it – and sometimes we give it incorrect instructions, with computers unable to think for themselves to question whether you really want to change things in a way that could break the internet. One of the problems that the outage demonstrates is the fallibility of the internet and the infrastructure that powers it, as well as the trouble with concentrating that power in just a few hands – and there are catastrophic consequences if something goes wrong.Īlthough we believe that the internet just operates independently, with computers whirring and buzzing and smoothly handling everything we throw at it, like all technology, it has a human parent that has decided how it will work. It’s like traversing a huge metropolis of complicated, interconnected roads without a map.

Science and Technical Research and Developmentįacebook had managed to delete itself from its own routing tables, meaning anyone who typed in – or any website that connects to Facebook using – was lost.

Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.

Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.

Information and Communications Technology.

HR, Training and Organisational Development.

Health - Medical and Nursing Management.

Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.

Events and Offers Sign up to receive information regarding NS events, subscription offers & product updates. Ideas and Letters A newsletter showcasing the finest writing from the ideas section and the NS archive, covering political ideas, philosophy, criticism and intellectual history - sent every Wednesday. Weekly Highlights A weekly round-up of some of the best articles featured in the most recent issue of the New Statesman, sent each Saturday. The Culture Edit Our weekly culture newsletter – from books and art to pop culture and memes – sent every Friday. Green Times The New Statesman’s weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. The New Statesman Daily The best of the New Statesman, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. World Review The New Statesman’s global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Select and enter your email address Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. The internet is a collection of interconnected networks.” Because of their ubiquity and power in driving large parts of how we communicate, some of the biggest digital companies in the world – including Facebook, Google and Microsoft – have responsibility for running the top tier of the internet. “The clue is in the name,” says Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey. To learn why a small change had an outsized impact, you need to look at how the internet is structured. In essence, a likely innocuous error by a Facebook employee managed to make it impossible to access Facebook services. In a statement, Facebook’s vice-president of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, said that “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication”. But an embarrassingly long six-hour Facebook outage on 4 October highlighted just how significant a role the company plays in our day-to-day digital lives – and left many wondering what could possibly have gone so wrong. It’s the front door of the internet for at least three billion of us, and one of the companies that underpins large swathes of the online world.

Facebook and whatsapp outage