On Monday 4th October 2021, sometime before noon ET something happened on the internet. Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, and other Facebook-related services went down. A massive downtime that took over 6 hours to resolve but lasted even more than this for all services to be fully operational.
It was all due to DNS and issues with DNS servers going offline.
What are the implications of this downtime?
A lot of big and also small businesses depend on Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or other related Facebook services. Having such a company go down is really problematic when businesses depend on such a company to deliver their services and do business online. We see companies offering customer support via WhatsApp and Facebook messenger. Businesses have Facebook pages to promote themselves, Others rely on Facebook ads for their revenue. All of these mean that Facebook is not just a social media platform but an integral part of their business ecosystem.
But such an outage has other implications.
Integrations into different websites result in issues with those websites. We at Netumo had issues with some legacy customers that rely on Facebook authentication to log into the Netumo console since the Facebook OAuth was also down. Some of our customers reported that their websites were rendering slower due to integrations with Facebook such as Facebook Pixel.
Adding such situations to your Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
A lesson to be learned from these outages is that such platforms need to start being added to the BCP as any issues with their uptime can result in outages on your end. It is also important to monitor all your services so that you can identify issues that could also be affecting your platforms.
