Cloudflare's in-depth analysis of FB outage

When you read Cloudflare’s blog post (link below) explaining today’s Facebook outage, you’ll come to appreciate a) the massive scale they have in monitoring the Internet and b) how quickly, thoroughly and clearly they can explain a complex routing issue, even to lay people.

The article gets to the heart of how routing works across the Internet, and how a browser or mobile app ultimately finds the Website at an IP address that corresponds to a name like facebook.com. Of course, we still don’t know the root cause of today’s outage. But Cloudflare’s blog explains not only why the site became unavailable but also why other sites like Twitter also slowed down as a result.

As you may recall, Fastly experienced a major outage back in June, which caused popular Websites like the NY Times, Reddit and Amazon.com to get taken offline. That hurt. With today’s 9% drop in FSLY, the stock is down almost 40% since the date of that outage. Meanwhile, NET is actually in the green today, amidst a sea of red in other names.

It’s amazing to me that an article of this depth could be written so quickly, even before the outage was fully resolved. Good reading.

Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet
https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/

-Ron
Long NET

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