Social Media Servers Down All World

Facebook/ Instagram/ WhatsApp Down

All right so we begin with a story thati'm sure a lot of you in south africaare for experienced because the socialmedia services facebook whatsapp andinstagram have been hit by an outagelost lasting more than an hour all threeservices are owned by the facebookcompany and could not be accessed overthe web or by smartphone appsdown detector which tracks outageslogged nearly 80 000 reportsfor what's up and more than 50 000 forfacebook and data from the websites thatsuggest that the outage is affectinguser accounts across the world well tohelp us make sense of what on earth isgoing on we're now joined by mybroadband editor in large jan vermeulenyan thanks very much indeed for joiningus and welcome to the programit's a pleasure to be here thank youvery much all right so i guess we nowknow that um if youon facebook you are linked to what's upand you're linked to instagram instantlyyes i think if anybody didn't know thatbefore today they'll know nowbecause yeah it's just facebook'snetwork that seems to be impacted hereand it's knocked all of their servicesoffline including something that i don'tthink a lot of people in south africamight have experienced called oculuswhich is a virtual reality platform andand so yes all facebook properties areaffectedso do we know what's happenedunfortunately not yet we we can only gosort of by the evidence that we have togo on facebook hasn't confirmed anythingyet other than to say that they're awarethat some people are struggling toaccess their serviceswhich obviously had everybody cry outsome people it's all people we can't wecan't access a thingbutthey've not confirmed what exactly hascaused this something like this hashappened before back in 2019 whichcaused an outage of hours longbut based on the information we haveit looks like it's related to what wecall the domain name systemum as or perhaps what we call the bordergateway protocol long story short it'sgot to do withinternet routing how traffic on theinternet ultimately gets to your serversand so uhsomewhere something has gone wrong onthe facebook network that is preventingus the user from actually reaching theservers on which facebook is kept andwhatsapp is kept for that matterso why would they link the threetogether um they bought them separatelyum and and one would have thought unlessthere's algorithms that are poppingright through the three systemsuh no so so in this case they they arehoused separately and and they do kindof operate within their own i guesssilos though there is a level of datasharing betweensome facebook services so betweeninstagram and facebook there'll be somedata sharing and there'll be somesharing between whatsapp and facebook sofor example you're you're able toconnect your business's whatsapp numberto your facebook page right but uhfacebook got in big big troublein the european union for uh even alittle bit of data sharingbetween whatsapp and facebook so they'renot allowed to do that what's happeninghere is the actual network thatunderpins everything facebook doeshas been knocked off the internet and soeven though these services are hosted uhyou know separately they're hosted inseparate locations so for example therewill be servers facebook's facebook andwhatsapp servers here in south africabut because ofwhat's happened here with the the wholefacebook network that's been knockedofflineno one can access anythingregardless of the fact that the servicesare separate that they distributed allover the world umso something something really bad hashappenedeithereither through some kind of mistake thata technician has made who's having areally bad night or perhaps through somekind of attack uh we'll only find outwhich of those two things it is um afterfacebook confirms it they're the onlyones who can is there a chance that itcould be something asdangerous as ransomwarethere's a chance though though i don'tthink that facebook would would fallprey to something like that and and iwould hope that they'd be able torecoverquickly from from a ransomware attackthis thisis seems far more severe than thatsoto put things in perspective ransomwareis something that would infectservers or computersthis is something that's knockedfacebook's core network infrastructureoffline and uh and that points tousually a mistake a technician somewherehas made a configuration mistake andthey are going to get fired tonightwell it could i mean you know therussians chinese uh have been accused ofuhyou know sometimes beingat the center ofcyber attacksand it would need somebody of that sizeand that abilityto disrupt i guess especially ifthese platforms are doing negativethings saying negative things allowingnegative things in their countriesright and andit there is a chance that it's an attackumas you say it would have to besomebody with an immense capability topull off an attack or some kind ofinsider uh perhapsfacebook has has had aeventful shall we say a few days therewas the whistleblower interview on 60minutes recentlywhere uhthey accused uh facebook of essentiallyweaponizing hatred and monetizing hatredand and so the people are connecting allof these dots together to try andexplainwhat's going on now but unfortunatelythere are just too many unknowns it canbe something as simple as aconfiguration error it's happened beforeit happened in 2019or it could be an attack but we'll we'llonly know for sure when facebookactually confirms it well it could be adisgruntled employee with access to keyparts of the businessexactly exactly uh it if if that werethe case if it were an act of sabotageum that would definitely be a first anduh it would have to be someone thatsomehow got access to multiple levels ofsystems um i would i would assume that acompany like facebook would havemeasures in place to prevent somethinglike that from happeningwhich is which is why i'm thinking it'sprobably uh a mistake like it was in2019 all right so the cost of this imean on one level it's reputation but onthe other for every minutethe people can't access this theseplatformsthat's advertising revenue that'sdisappearing and can never be recoveredright so facebook itself has lost atremendous amount of revenue tremendousamount of trust um and then uh markzuckerberg individuallyhas lostnearly seven billion dollars it mightactually be more by now umso this is this is bloomberg reportingthat he's uh his personal wealth hasfallen byaround 105 billion rands if you convertthatand that's because of how the stockprice price has plunged sincemid-september 15 down five percent downtoday so the the markets as wellpunishing facebook for everything that'sgone wrong um in the last month andespecially in the last couple of days uhwith the whistleblower and now with theoutagewhat does this mean for consumers mightwe then say you know what i was upsetwith the new rules of whatsapp i'm goingto telegram and and i'm never going backto what's up might this be decisionsthat people are makingcertainly i mean it's certainly what wesaw with bbm in south africa i don'tknow how many people remember bbm butthere were problems on the bbm networkbut it took multipletimes right it had to happen uh severaltimes and it had to happen inwithin months of one another and thenpeople started going you know what i'mditching my blackberry i'm ditching bbmand i'm switching to whatsapp um and sowe could definitely see something likethatuh with with uh whatsapp peopleswitching to telegram though i wouldprefer if they switch to signal insteadum andyou know with folks going you know whati've had enough uh i've you know there'sall this negativity around facebook andnow this outage and i need to be able tocommunicate with my friends and familyespecially while we're still on someform of lockdownand uh and you know we've we've come torely on whatsapp uh for everything insouth africa from from uh you know voicecalls to it's replaced everything fromsms to to video calling for usand and yeah people would would uh ithink tonight uh be looking at switchingtosomething like telegram if theydesperately need to be communicatingwith their friends and family and wewere just talking about the socialaspect but there are a lot of businessesnow that communicate with theircustomers through what's up and i knowthat uhum mypodiatrist for example it communicateswithherpatientsthrough what's up and so that means anumber of businessesare in troubleyesbusinesses are in trouble though i meanfortunately it's relatively late in theevening in south africaum though i've heard from restaurantswho have said that they've been impactedbecause they can't communicate onwhatsapp but our own government our owngovernment is communicates withjournalists and and with its people uhthrough these platforms you know whetherit's facebook or whatsapp or now twitterso at least twitter is still up um butyou know it's gotten to the stage wheregovernment departments in this countryupdate their facebook and twitter pagesmore diligently than they do their ownwebsites and you know would postinformation via whatsapp groups uh farmore than than they wouldthrough uh platforms that they own and ii really hope that this is a wake-upcall uh to everybody who who uh operateswho needs to you know communicate withcustomers communicate with constituentsand stakeholders that you you need tomake sure that you own a platform ofyour own because if an outage like thishappensyou need to be able toor you need to know that you cancommunicate with folks uh without beinguhyou know dependent on somebody else'splatform to do soi mean they're failing on the crisiscommunications front aren't there i meanyou know the first thing you want totell people when you have a majorproblem like this is what is happeningand it doesn't seem to be the caseindeed uh and the only update on theofficial facebook twitter page right nowfunny enough they they've uhthey've posted to twitter their archrival umit was two hours agofacebook said we're aware that somepeople are having trouble accessing ourapps and products we're working to getthings back to normal as quickly aspossible and we apologize for anyinconveniencetrying to downplay the severityof the outage umyou know while not providing any kind offeedback about what's going on how longit will be down for uh yes absolutelythey are failing at crisiscommunicationsjanthanks very much indeed i wish i couldwhat's up my thanks but we're gonna haveto leave it there my friend thanks somuch indeed for joining uspleasure thank youEnglish (auto-generated)AllFrom your searchRelatedRecently uploadedWatched