Internet shutdown: Experts explain why Facebook and Instagram keep crashing

Mark Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and instagram The accident happened for the second time in a month last night, while banks, phone networks and a range of fellow tech giants have also experienced major disruptions recently.

Even Britain’s Largest Supermarket Tesco was brought to its knees by a hack Due to its website and app last month, thousands of customers were unable to order groceries for 48 hours and the retailer lost an estimated £40m in revenue.

But what is behind all these website crashes and outages? Is this just a coincidence, a fundamental problem with the back-end system or is something more sinister happening?

MailOnline has spoken to a number of cyber security and internet experts to find out the main causes of the outages, starting with the problems experienced by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s parent company Meta.

Matthew Hodgson, co-founder and CEO of Elementor and technical co-founder of Matrix, said Meta’s centralized back-end system was a major problem.

This means there is a single point of failure that can affect Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, rather than just one platform.

“The recent disruptions are an unavoidable side-effect of mass centralization, where companies like Facebook have ended up on the critical path of providing infrastructure for billions of people,” Hodgson told MailOnline.

‘Consumers are inadvertently obliged to put all their eggs in one basket, and when there is inevitably some failure mode for that company or its infrastructure (whether accidental or malicious) the end result is catastrophic. ‘

Internet scientist Professor Bill Buchanan also believes that the Internet has become too centralized.

He called for the system to have multiple nodes so that not a single failure would stop a service from working.

Hodgson agreed.

“The solution is to decentralize apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, like the web and email, and the internet has no central point of control or failure – so there is no single company or infrastructure that can affect the entire system. ” he said.

Jake Moore, a spokesman for internet security and antivirus company ESET, told MailOnline: ‘Centralizing your data has been one of the biggest issues for Meta combining all three giants – Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.

‘With that comes problems that often don’t happen until crunch time which can be too late.

‘These outages are often the result and companies using these platforms for business use must have other tools that rely on these services such as another messaging tool.

‘We may see more disruptions in the coming months as more people use these services.’

When an outage occurs, people often speculate that the disruption is the result of some sort of cyberattack, several experts said.

But he said it is often due to human error, as happened last month when Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger were shut down for seven hours.

It was eventually blamed on a faulty update that disconnected Meta’s servers from the Internet and brought down all of its platforms.

Back in June, a massive Internet blackout that brought down hundreds of websites around the world was also An unidentified IT customer charged.

This left millions of people unable to access major sites including Amazon, Spotify and PayPal, as well as the BBC, the UK government and the White House.

The firm said a customer of Fastly, the US cloud-computing company responsible for the problem, changed its settings when the outage occurred due to a software bug triggered.

Gav Winters, CEO of website performance and cybersecurity firm Rapidspike.com, has said that massive outages have increased over the past 12 months, adding that human error was often a big culprit.

He said the mistakes happened because many employees are under pressure from their company and choose to take unfortunate shortcuts.

Experts also told MailOnline that IT problems are compounded by the outdated systems that hold the Internet together.

Having been born in 1989, the World Wide Web is now an ‘aging infrastructure’, he said, and is coming under pressure from more users.

“The Internet is not the massively distributed network that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the original architect of the Internet, tried to build, that could withstand a nuclear-strike on any part of it,” Professor Buchanan has previously stated BBC.

‘The protocols it uses are basically just the ones that were devised when we connected dumb terminals to mainframe computers. A single glitch in its basic infrastructure can bring the whole thing down.

Moore also said that tech giants and other businesses have been hit by the unexpected surge in traffic due to the COVID pandemic, putting pressure on their infrastructure.

“These outages are increasing in volume because of the number of more online users and traffic,” he said.

‘The pandemic has forced more people to go online in quick succession, rather than the slow growth anticipated over time.

‘It’s a lot like funneling through large numbers of passages made for time elapsed because of a black out when a lot of people visit a website at once to buy tickets that have just gone on sale.’

Moore said: ‘Businesses must test their infrastructure and put multiple failures in place, but as is often the case, it is impossible to simulate the size and magnitude of the problem in a secure environment without testing the actual network. ‘

According to Luke Dericks, chief technical officer of Down Detector, a website that monitors websites for disruption, widespread outages are becoming more frequent and more severe.

All experts at MailOnline said that major outages were on the rise and are only expected to increase further in case of their disruption.

The answer, he says, lies in companies moving to more decentralized systems, updating aging infrastructure and creating servers that are more suitable in terms of the number of users they can host.

Unless that happens, there is likely to be a lot more disruptions, with Meta and its vast swath of users bearing the brunt of the disruption.