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DNS protocol failure likely culprit behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp outage — Group-IB

According to the statement, the exact cause of the outage is not yet known, but the most likely culprit is that the DNS records associated with Facebook services being removed from the global routing tables

MOSCOW, October 5. /TASS/. The global outage that hit social networks on Monday could have been triggered by the withdrawal of DNS records, related to Facebook, from global routing tables, Group-IB company specializing in cybersecurity told TASS.

According to the statement, the exact cause of the outage is not yet known, but the most likely culprit is that the DNS records associated with Facebook services being removed from the global routing tables.

"The Domain Name System (DNS) service is like an address book in the Internet that contains an IP address of a domain. If we compare this to a city, it would look like this: there is a house but it was wiped off the map, and now no one can find it," Head of Special Projects at the company’s Digital Risk Protection (DRP) department Vladimir Kalugin was quoted in the statement.

The company highlighted that the failure of Facebook services was one of the most massive of late and set off a domino effect. The load shifted to other tech giants from Telegram to YouTube and other social networks seeing their traffic accelerate.

"Such outages when failures in one major Internet company cause problems for the entire Internet, are most likely to happen in the future since there is a growing trend towards the centralization of capacity around key players," the company said.

On Monday, users across the globe reported a massive disruption in the activities of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Facebook, which owns these social networks and the messenger service, confirmed information about the problems and assured that they were in the process of fixing them.