Robert Siciliano explains what caused Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to go down for hours in October 2021. A DNS misconfiguration likely triggered the outage, which disrupted third-party logins and left businesses scrambling. He recommends backing up your data anyway, regardless of Facebook's claims that nothing was compromised.
Chapters
Just hours after a Facebook whistleblower went public with company information, the platform, along with other social sites it owns— Instagram, WhatsApp— went down. That blackout, blackout cut off communication for billions of people around the world. So what went wrong, and is your information at risk? Joining us this morning is cybersecurity expert Robert Siciliano. Robert, somebody says— somebody at Facebook said that someone accidentally deleted some crucial files. What do you think of this? It's kind of interesting timing with this hearing going on about Facebook by this whistleblower.
Yeah, so there doesn't seem to be a connection between the whistleblower and what they call a server misconfiguration. So DNS, domain name server, is basically like if you type in facebook.com, the internet knows where to go. And someone had corrupted that information, deleted some information revolving around that.
Okay.
And essentially made it so that when you type in facebook.com, you could not find Facebook.
Oops. Yeah. So, you know, businesses rely on these platforms for sales directly. We've spoken to some local ones, or they pay them to promote their profiles. Is there any way that you can recoup losses from an outage like this?
Yes. So, you know, it'd be interesting to see if the class action lawsuits come rolling in. Right. I don't know if that will happen. The businesses that were down were down for as many as 6 to 8 hours or more. Most of them will probably recoup whatever losses they had because, you know, for most people, Facebook is the actual internet. And if they're consuming products and services from that platform, then They'll probably be getting them today.
And it is hard because it is, you know, the internet for so many people. When there's no customer service, it's not like you can call an 800 number and say, hey, Facebook, when is this going to be resolved? Or how am I going to, you know, make up the money that I spent on a campaign promoting my profile? I mean, it really is a different world in this digital age.
Yeah, it's like, you know, it's like someone turned the electricity off, right? There's just no lights on. And because we rely so much on these platforms, it's not just Facebook that was down. It's WhatsApp and other— and Instagram. That people use Facebook and all of those apps to log into other sites. So it's that ecosystem that Facebook owns that made it difficult for so many other platforms to be accessible.
Do you think that any personal information was at risk as a result of the outage? And maybe not just, you know, sensitive information, but a lot of people, you know, use Facebook to host photos and to hold memories. Should this be a reminder to us that this is not the only place that we share this information or save these pictures?
Well, Facebook did say that no personal information was compromised, but you know, Facebook lies, so we don't necessarily know. That being said, it is really important to back up your data both locally and in other places in the cloud. Not having all of your information in one place is a good thing. You always want to back up redundantly.
Well, cyber expert Robert Siciliano, thanks for joining us and giving us a little insight there. And later today, Boston 25 of course will be monitoring a panel hearing on Capitol Hill about the whistleblower's original complaints. Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey is participating in that hearing, so we'll let you know what is revealed during that testimony.
