From Wired:
“Facebook's outage appears to be caused by DNS; however that's a just symptom of the problem,” says Troy Mursch, chief research officer of cyber-threat intelligence company Bad Packets. The fundamental issue, Mursch says—and other experts agree—is that Facebook has withdrawn the so-called Border Gateway Protocol route that contains the IP addresses of its DNS nameservers. If DNS is the internet’s phone book, BGP is its navigation system; it decides what route data takes as it travels the information superhighway.
“You can think of it like a game of telephone,” but instead of people playing, it's smaller networks letting each other know how to reach them, says Angelique Medina, director of product marketing at the network monitoring firm Cisco ThousandEyes. “They announce this route to their neighbor and their neighbor will propagate it out to their peers.”
It’s a lot of jargon, but easy to put plain: Facebook has fallen off the internet’s map. If you try to ping those IP addresses right now? “The packets end up in a black hole,” Mursch says.
http://www.wired.com/story/why-facebook-instagram-whatsapp-went-down-outage/?mbid=social_twitter&utm_brand=wired&utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter
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