In case you were wondering what exactly is BGP, it's essentially a traffic cop that is making sure the cars on the street (in this case, data) are moving smoothly and efficiently. What is BGP and why is it responsible for this?

Also out of reach were servers for Instagram, WhatsApp and even Oculus VR.Īlso Read: Why The Internet Keeps Going Down Frequently, Blocking Access To Your Favourite Websites Sometime later, Cloudflare VP Dane Knecht revealed on Twitter that their BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routes have been withdrawn from the internet, making Facebook’s own DNS servers being out of reach.

This meant that even though the DNS was online and load balancers for the services were reachable, the app servers that should be connecting with the load balancers were offline. Reportedly, Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable however they showed HTTP 503 error (which essentially meant no server was available for the request). Instagram was down too, but, its DNS services that are actually hosted on AWS instead of Facebook’s own network were functional.

However, the report highlights that the problem actually is much deeper than that.

Could be caused due to a failed configuration changeĪs per the report, the source for this problem seems to be major DNS failures at Facebook.

What is BGP and why is it responsible for this?.

Facebook instagram whatsapp down