On Monday morning, billions of people around the world woke up to the unthinkable: Facebook.com was gone. This wasn’t something that could be solved by refreshing a page, or by resetting a router. The reason that Facebook, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp, were inaccessible was because for six hours those domains simply did not exist. In the fallout, Facebook continues to face an antitrust lawsuit from the American Federal Trade Commision (FTC).
Facebook has been a staple in the daily lives of millions since it was launched in 2006. Initially retailed as a way to connect with friends and family, it now serves multiple functions, including as a marketplace and news media platform. It’s popularity is evident just from the number of visits the site receives monthly. In June 2021, Facebook saw 20 billion visits, making it the third most popular website in the entire world, according to Statistia.com. Written out, 20,000,000,000 has ten zeros, which is nearly three times the Earth’s current population of 7,753,000,000 people. Considering that Facebook claims its active user base numbers around 2,890,000,000, that would mean that the average user was searching up the website at least seven times a month.
When a website that large vanishes without a trace, it’s no wonder why many people were in a panic during its outage. So, what was the cause? It wasn’t a terrorist attack, nor the result of anything physical disappearing or being damaged. Instead, the issue arose during a routine update when Facebook deleted itself from the metaphorical GPS of the internet.
Every website that exists is hosted on an actual physical computer somewhere in the world. For a website the size of Facebook, it is hosted over a huge network of so called server computers, some literally countries apart. However, they all share one thing: their home address. To access a website your computer, tablet, or smartphone first has to send a request to locate it. This request is sent to something referred to as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which routes your computer towards the correct destination. Think of it like an old school telephone switchboard, or like a library index reference sheet.
At some point, a message was sent to the BGP which basically told it that the domains for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were no longer available. Going forward, whenever someone tried to access one of those websites, the BGP no longer knew where to send them. For all intents and purposes, Facebook ceased to exist, although the physical servers were unharmed and running perfectly fine.
The solution to the problem was equally simple: send another message letting the BGP know that Facebook was back to where it had been, however, sending that message turned out to be very difficult. At Facebook headquarters, the software that runs the website also runs their internal company emailing system, as well as the digital locks on many of the doors. The lockout was so overwhelming that it took several hours before someone who could fix the issue even managed to get inside the building.
“Not only are Facebook’s services and apps down for the public, its internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, are out as well. No one can do any work. Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.” Tweeted New York Times Tech Reporter Ryan Mac, during the day of the shutdown.
The shutdown happened almost immediately on the heels of the airing of a “60 Minutes” CBS interview with company whistleblower Frances Haugen who leaked hundreds of internal documents, detailing alleged negligence on the part of Facebook in dealing with violent hate groups on their platform. According to Haugen, Facebook had knowledge of several potentially violent hate groups that were using their website to spread rhetoric and network with other similarly minded groups. Furthermore, it also had the alleged ability to remove these groups, but instead, according to the whistleblower, the groups were allowed to stay because they generated large amounts of interaction, whether in agreement or opposition.
Additionally, in December of 2020, the FTC filed a lawsuit against Facebook, claiming that it was acting in monopolistic ways. The complaint alleges that “Facebook has engaged in a systematic strategy—including its 2012 acquisition of up-and-coming rival Instagram, its 2014 acquisition of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp, and the imposition of anticompetitive conditions on software developers—to eliminate threats to its monopoly. This course of conduct harms competition, leaves consumers with few choices for personal social networking, and deprives advertisers of the benefits of competition,” according to the FTC website.
Following the shutdown on Monday, Facebook filed for a second time to have the lawsuit dismissed, stating in court documents that the FTC hadn’t succeeded in finding a “”plausible factual basis for branding Facebook an unlawful monopolist.”
“The FTC’s fictional market ignores the competitive reality: Facebook competes vigorously with TikTok, iMessage, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube, and countless others to help people share, connect, communicate or simply be entertained,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an interview with Reuters’ reporter, David Shepardson, “The FTC cannot credibly claim Facebook has monopoly power because no such power exists.”
