Cybersecurity Experts Say The Cause Of Facebook, Instagram, And WhatsApp Falls Due To Human Error

The downfall of Facebook, Whatsapp and Messenger was caused by a configuration change in the backbone router. (photo: doc. unsplash)

JAKARTA - Mark Zuckerberg's social media crash, which includes Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, and Messenger, is the worst since a similar incident in 2019, at which time services experienced a decline of more than 24 hours.

This incident left all users confused, especially those who rely on the social media giant for their livelihood. Meanwhile, cyber security expert Pratama Persadha explained that the collapse of all Facebook-owned social media was probably an error in the DNS (Domain Name System).

“This DNS delivers a certain URL in this case facebook.com to a certain IP where Facebook is located. In this case, there is an authoritative DNS route that allows all Internet networks to communicate with Facebook. This can also happen due to human error", said Pratama in a statement received by VOI, Tuesday, October 5.

Pratama added that there might be a serious system error. This is evidenced by the system for communication on Facebook's internal also down.

“From Facebook's internal information, they also ended up using Outlook to communicate temporarily, because their internal communication system was also down. Even several Facebook employees were immediately dispatched to their data center, to deal with the problem", said Pratama.

According to Pratama, the possibility of losing the authoritative DNS route on Facebook is getting stronger with improvements to be made in the company's data center. This means that Facebook's engineering team also cannot access their system from outside the data center, due to the absence of DNS.

However, Facebook's Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, in his blog post stated that the failure of the three services was caused by configuration changes in the backbone router. Unfortunately, Janardhan did not provide a more detailed explanation regarding this matter.

"Our engineering team has learned that configuration changes to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers is causing problems that disrupt these communications", said Janardhan.

Janardhan also made it clear at this time that it believes the root cause of this outage is a wrong configuration change, "We also have no evidence that user data has been compromised as a result of this (service) downfall", Janardhan added.

For information, in 2019, at least four times Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram experienced disruptions simultaneously. According to Facebook's acknowledgment, some of the causes include a new system update on the digital service.

"However, the possibility of hacking also exists. If the root of the problem is in DNS, the cause could be a miss configuration by human error or hacking. Because it has been down many times, and if it is caused by a configuration error or human error, it seems impossible to keep repeating it", said Primary.