Meta outage, 4 October 2021
The Meta outage of 4 October 2021: what failed, why, and what Meta changed, from its own incident report.
- Provider
- Meta
- Date
- Cause
- Network/BGP
- Regions
- Global
Facebook/Meta global backbone and DNS/BGP outage (4 October 2021).
What happened. During routine maintenance, a command meant to assess global backbone capacity unintentionally took down all backbone connections, and a bug in the audit tool failed to stop it. With the backbone gone, Facebook’s DNS servers withdrew their BGP advertisements, making Facebook’s DNS unreachable to the rest of the internet.
What changes. Meta said it would strengthen testing, drills and overall resilience, including looking for ways to simulate a global backbone outage in its ‘storm’ drills.
Questions
What caused the Meta outage in October 2021?
During routine maintenance, a command meant to assess global backbone capacity unintentionally took down all backbone connections, and a bug in the audit tool failed to stop it.
Which services were affected?
Facebook and Meta platforms/apps, internal tools.
Read how shared dependencies spread a failure in why one cloud outage can break unrelated apps, or browse the outage archive.
- Services affected
- Facebook and Meta platforms/apps, internal tools
- Incident report
- engineering.fb.com
- Sources
Source Link Meta incident report https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/outage-details/ Official framing https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/outage/