Business Standard

Address this: Facebook's 6-hour outage likely caused by simple tech problem

Not only did Facebook's primary platforms go down, but so too did some of its internal applications, including the company's own email system

Facebook
Premium

Photo: Bloomberg

Kartikay Mehrotra | Bloomberg
The outages on Monday at Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram likely occurred because of a problem in the company’s domain name system, an obscure but crucial component of the internet.
 
Commonly known as DNS, it’s like a phone book for the internet. It’s the tool that converts a web domain, like Facebook.com, into the actual internet protocol, or IP, address where the site resides. Think of Facebook.com as the person one might look up in the white pages, and the IP address as the physical address they’ll find. 

On Monday, a technical problem related to Facebook Inc.’s DNS records generated at

What you get on BS Premium?

  • Unlock 30+ premium stories daily hand-picked by our editors, across devices on browser and app.
  • Pick your 5 favourite companies, get a daily email with all news updates on them.
  • Full access to our intuitive epaper - clip, save, share articles from any device; newspaper archives from 2006.
  • Preferential invites to Business Standard events.
  • Curated newsletters on markets, personal finance, policy & politics, start-ups, technology, and more.
VIEW ALL FAQs

Need More Information - write to us at assist@bsmail.in