Ask HN: How can Facebook go down?

7 points by sdouglas 11y ago ↗ HN

Surely Facebook's server code and databases are replicated around the world, partly for redundancy and partly for faster content delivery. So presumably a datacenter to burn down (or a big storm can hit the US) and Facebook could keep ticking over. What, then, could cause the whole thing to go down? I'd love to hear people's thoughts.

Perhaps the fault was with Akamai, but then my question really just changes to 'How can Akamai go down?'

2 comments

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cr3ative 11y ago ↗

They blamed a configuration change gone wrong. If that was a change to their core routers, deployed to everything at once (or just to some crucial parts first, even), it's quite believable that they could take (public-facing, at least) network down in one fell swoop.

SEJeff 11y ago ↗

Akamai is many many caching devices with fancy routing (massive oversimplification). Announcing routes incorrectly, on purpose, or maliciously, can cause entire swaths of the internet or entire countries to go offline. It is sometimes called route poisoning or ip hijacking

A few examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/BGP+multiple+banking+addre... http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/repeated-attacks-hij...

etc, etc.