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Facebook outage cost Russian economy about $1 mln per hour, expert says

Anna Mikhailova added that the outage of the social network "indirectly affected almost the entire infrastructure of the Internet"

MOSCOW, October 5. /TASS/. The global outage of Facebook cost the Russian economy about 70 mln rubles ($963,808) an hour, Anna Mikhailova, business development manager of the Angara Group of companies, told TASS on Tuesday. Angara Group specializes in information security.

"According to rough estimates, <...> within an hour the domestic economy lost about 70 mln rubles due to the outage of Facebook in Russia," she said.

She added that the outage of Facebook "indirectly affected almost the entire infrastructure of the Internet."

"For example, even telecom operators in Russia felt an almost simultaneous DDoS attack from users trying to understand what was going on. The traffic of accessibility services (such as Downdetector) or the alternative Telegram messenger jumped several times," Mikhailova added.

On Monday, according to data from Downdetector, a service that monitors the activities of popular Internet websites, users reported a massive disruption in the activities of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Given the outage and disruption, the shares of large IT companies plunged.

According to American experts Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, and Brian Krebs, a well-known journalist in cybersecurity, the disruption of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was caused by the fact that on the morning of October 4, EST, someone inside Facebook updated routing protocols that allow browsers to find the addresses of these social networks. The global outage lasted more than 6.5 hours.