The chances are this will not the the last major website outage this year.
Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook, yesterday, joined the stock pile of websites and apps that have experienced major outages this year alone. Facebook said that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication, which had a ripple effect on the way their data centers communicate, bringing their services to a halt. This more recent incident highlights that global outages are one of the major downsides of a centralized system, and with many top websites STILL grappling with the challenges of yet another widespread website outage, the question remains: “what keeps causing these website disruptions?” Commenting on the recent widespread downtime, Matthew Hodgson, CEO of Element said, “Centralised apps mean that all the eggs are in one basket. When that basket breaks, all the eggs get smashed. We saw the same last week when Slack went down. “Decentralised systems are far more reliable. There’s no single point of failure so they can withstand significant disruption and still keep people and businesses communicating. “It’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing an increase in enterprises using Element and the decentralised Matrix network, particularly for mission-critical operations.” Some of the biggest global services other than Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp that have experienced a major outage this year include, the website of online lodging marketplace Airbnb, British Airways and digital entertainment service PlayStation Network, went down for an hour on Thursday afternoon. Other brands that have also had issues staying live online this year include UPS, Home Depot, Delta, HSBC bank, Capital One, GoDaddy, LastPass, AT&T, Costco and Vanguard, among others, whose websites were either loading slowly or showing “Service Unavailable – DNS failure.” Users flocked to the website Downdetector, which monitors internet outages, to report issues with over 48 services. The website only indicates when issues are occurring, but does not diagnose why said issues are happening. So… what’s going on? The culprit behind the interference this time was a software configuration update to cloud service firm Akamai Technologies that activated a bug in the company’s Domain Name System ( DNS) – the system that directs browsers on your phone or computer to websites. DNS is essentially the Yellow Pages of the Internet, except it holds information online through domain names. As web browsers interact through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses [unique to your computer network], DNS translates domain names to IP addresses for browsers to load internet resources.
