Steve Bagley, a professor of computer science at the University of Nottingham, has explained what happened and uses a routing mapping tool to illustrate how Facebook servers disappeared from the network connections until it appeared as completely offline.
Although Facebook engineers are intelligent folks, they admit the fact that “Our systems are designed to audit commands like these to prevent mistakes like this, but a bug in that audit tool prevented it from properly stopping the command.” Oops. It mostly followed the ideas first presented in that 1998 testimony. Unfortunately, this time around, Facebook suffered a self-inflicted wound when one of their network engineers sent a command that basically took the entire company’s server collection off the internet.
They warned that computer networks were embarrassingly insecure, bragging that any one of them could take the entire internet down in just a few minutes thanks to weaknesses in BGP routing.
