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Why did Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp shut down?
What actually caused the outage?
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The Facebook logo is displayed on a mobile phone in this picture illustration taken Dec.2, 2019. (Reuters/Johanna Geron)
H
undreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world's reliance on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant.
But what actually caused the outage?
What does Facebook say happened?
In an apologetic blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, said that "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication".
Can you explain that in plain English?
Cyber experts think the problem boils down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Patrol -- the system the internet uses to pick the quickest route to move packets of information around.
Sami Slim of data centre company Telehouse compared BGP to "the internet equivalent of air traffic control".
