Facebook's family of products — including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger — started coming back online early Tuesday morning (IST) after being down for nearly six hours in an unprecedented outage affecting billions of users. The outage which started around 9 pm IST on Monday not only affected Facebook's own products and users but also websites and apps that use Facebook services like ads and authentication (Login with Facebook). According to outage-tracking site Downdetector, this was the largest outage the company saw with over 14 million problem reports from all over the globe. What caused the outage? Facebook is yet to publish a detailed post on what went wrong but in a short blog post, the company said that the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between Facebook data centers. "This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt," the company said. The company also said that there is no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime. In a more detailed explanation of what went wrong, CDN provider Cloudflare explained that the outage can be traced back to an issue with something called the BGP or Border Gateway Protocol, which is a mechanism to exchange routing information between different networks on the internet. "The Internet is literally a network of networks, and it’s bound together by BGP. BGP allows one network (say Facebook) to…
