Explained | Facebook’s virtual disappearing act

Facebook's servers were down globally for nearly six hours on Monday. Its internal systems were down, too. Experts point to an update to its Border-Gateway Protocol (BGP) as a possible cause for the outage.

Facebook Inc.’s services suffered a massive outage on Monday for as long as six hours.. It also disrupted businesses around the world that rely on the social network’s tools and services. As Facebook manages its own internal tools and email service, the company’s employees were also unable to access work-related applications.

While apps and websites suffering outages is common, hours-long global disruption in rare. Facebook said late Monday (U.S. time) “That configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted” network traffic. The company’s head of engineering and infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, noted in a blog that the outage affected Facebook’s internal systems, making it harder to restore access.

for the system and network to be completely restored. In the meantime, networking experts are pointing to an update to Border-Gateway Protocol (BGP) as a possible cause for the outage.