Network disturbances on WhatsApp (WA), Instagram (IG), and Facebook (FB) that occurred on Monday (4/10/2021) night became a conversation.
Many complain about WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook errors so they can’t be used.
Launching Wired, Monday (4/10/2021), the disruption that occurred was judged to be a complete social media outage that seemed very difficult to fix.
In Indonesia, the duration of this disturbance or network error occurs about 8 hours.
Troy Mursch, chief researcher at Cyber Threat Intelligence Company Bad Packets, said the error on Facebook appeared to be caused by DNS.
According to him, the underlying problem of this social media disruption is because Facebook has withdrawn the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route which contains the IP address of its DNS name servers.
As a result, the BGP (navigation system) decides the route data that passes through the main information road.
Facebook has not disclosed why the BGP routes disappeared in the first place.
Known, Facebook is stuck on the same and can’t reach the internet to fix the BGP routing issue that allows it to reach the internet.
What Is A BGP Router And How Does It Play A Role In Connecting To The Internet?
Cyber security observer Yerry Niko Borang said, BGP is an infrastructure bridge to connect a collection of computer servers.
“BGP is a kind of infrastructure bridge plus software to connect clusters/server-computer groups to one another,” said Yerry when contacted by Kompas.com, Tuesday (5/10/2021).
He explained that every roundabout has an internal BGP. One roundabout consists of thousands or even tens of thousands of servers/computers.
This roundabout is then connected to an external BGP.
“Actually, BGP works like routing, for example sharing resources. For example, servers and services in region A are full and congested, BGP will divert this traffic density to other server clusters,” he continued.
Yerry said that traffic jams or disturbances at BGP are like traffic that has been lost or not regulated by the police.
This causes the resources that are intertwined to be chaotic or unkempt.
This means that the traffic controller is missing and causes the infrastructure, whether the computer or connection or BGP software, to die.
This problem takes time to resolve.
“The matter of how long the completion process will take depends, and also the speed of finding which connection is dead,” said Yerry.
He revealed, we can imagine several servers that are managed as big as one big stadium and spread in many countries, it will definitely take time to find a solution.
“This is indeed the reality of the internet world. From usage it seems virtual, but in fact it is only millions of computers that are connected,” he said.
Therefore, obstacles in BGP Routing aka controlling data traffic traffic between Facebook server clusters are indeed not easy to find, considering the scale and number of servers being managed is very large.
Yerry reminded that this case shows the weakness of the service monopoly when applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram are under one roof.
As a result, when there is a problem, all services are down.
“There is an influence between BGP routing and current constraints, because BGP routing is obviously getting harder and harder, with more services,” said Yerry.
He also revealed that this BGP could be in the form of a computer server or router that is connected to other computers to perform the division of labor.
Generally, the software that works already uses AI or artificial intelligence.
Currently, the service is back to normal.