Just on the heels of a(nother) whistleblower condemning the social media giant for its business practices, the Facebook ecosystem experienced a global outage at 11:40am ET yesterday.
It’s a sure tell that something must be pretty bad at Facebook, Inc. when the company is forced to turn to its competitor, Twitter, to communicate with its users. Facebook has a risk-management problem. Just on the heels of a(nother) whistleblower condemning the social media giant for its business practices, the Facebook ecosystem experienced a global outage at 11:40am ET yesterday – affecting its core platform as well as Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus VR. While the company has yet to confirm the exact cause of the ongoing issue, sources are pointing to an issue with DNS where BGP routes have disappeared. Update: Facebook has issued an apology and confirmed that its outage was caused by configuration changes to its backbone routers. Over the past two years, Facebook consolidated its disparate app ecosystem onto one backend infrastructure. It’s a move that creates some operational efficiencies for the company and insulation from a potential breakup by regulators. But it also exposes Facebook to concentration risk: A single risk event that produces a cascading effect – like old school Christmas lights where one goes out, they all go out. This strategy comes at the expense of redundancy and impairs the company’s resilience.
