On October 4, Facebook was offline for about six hours due to human error. The company states that “configuration changes on our backbone routers” was the cause. In this post for Avast, I’ll explain what happened and walk through the takeaways for running your own business network. Thanks to two Internet protocols, DNS and BGP, Facebook engineers accidentally took their servers offline and prevented their users of WhatsApp and Instagram from operating their apps as well.

A more technical explanation can be found here on CLoudflare’s blog. This diagram shiows the outage of all three services: