The meta outage affected Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more. Here’s what we know so far

MELBOURNE, Dec 14 (The Conversation) A massive outage is affecting users of popular social media and messaging services such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp around the world. All of these platforms are operated by social media giant Meta.

As news of the outage spread, we learned that it affected nearly all of Meta’s products, including Messenger and Threads, as well as Meta’s business products, including Facebook Ads Manager and the Messenger API for Instagram.

Most services are starting to come back online. But what went wrong? What can we learn from this massive outage?

Power outages have been reported in the UK, Canada, the US and elsewhere.

The outage was first reported in the United States on Wednesday (around 12:30 p.m. in New York, around 5:30 p.m. in London, and around 4:30 a.m. Thursday in Sydney).

Five hours later, Meta posted to X to report that he was 99 percent complete on resolving the issue.

What could be the cause?

At this time, there is no official announcement regarding the cause of the failure. However, you can make some guesses based on that range.

According to previous reports, the outage affected Meta’s major social media platforms and messaging services, as well as some of the company’s business products. Also affected was Meta’s Login with Facebook service, which allows users to log in to third-party sites using their Facebook username and password.

In other words, there seem to be very few meta products that were not affected by this disorder.

This suggests that everything that went wrong is a single point of failure. In other words, there is something that every service in Meta depends on, without which the service will not function.

These types of power outages are rare. Because the major internet platforms are designed to be reliable.

The primary method of achieving reliability is replication. For example, when you visit Instagram, your computer connects to a server that sends back your Instagram feed. In fact, Instagram content is not stored on a single computer, but is replicated across a large set of computers known as a content delivery network (or CDN).

Virtually all major web platforms, including news sites such as The Conversation, large corporations, and online services such as YouTube and Google, use content delivery networks to make their websites reliable and efficient. Masu.

The idea behind content delivery networks is that if one computer in the network has a problem, another computer can take over. This increases network reliability.

Content delivery networks are also useful when your website is in high demand. If many people are trying to request the same content, those requests are distributed among many computers in the network, allowing each to be processed more efficiently.

The widespread nature of Meta’s outage suggests that it may have occurred in a portion of Meta’s system that has not been replicated. However, we will have to wait to hear from Meta about the cause before we know for sure.

The Meta outage comes on the heels of a major outage caused by CrowdStrike’s Falcon security software earlier this year. Falcon’s design meant a deep connection to Microsoft Windows. Therefore, Falcon became a single point of failure, and when it crashed, Windows also took down gracefully.

A key lesson from this failure was that intrusive security software such as Falcon needed to be redesigned to work within the arms of Windows. This idea, known as fault isolation, states that a system should be built as a collection of discrete components, so that the failure of one component does not cause the entire system to fail.

This is why modern ships are designed with multiple internal compartments and mechanisms that attempt to make each compartment watertight. That way, even if the hull breaks, water won’t flood the entire ship.

The Meta outage is a timely reminder of the need to design critical systems to maximize reliability, including minimizing central points of failure and employing engineering principles such as fault isolation.

In the meantime, the exact cause of Meta’s outage remains unknown.

Many people around the world use Meta’s services. This includes businesses that use Instagram as their primary platform for acquiring customers online and sellers that use Facebook Marketplace as their primary source of revenue. For many families, WhatsApp has become an essential way to stay in touch, especially during times of crisis.

We can only hope that Meta comes clean about the cause of this outage and what steps it will take to prevent it from happening again. (Conversation) GRS GRS