Just a bit about that complete blackout from yesterday

I estimate the chance is about one hundred percent that the first topic you bring up today with colleagues and/or friends is the blackout from yesterday. Yes, because we can indeed speak of a blackout, right? No Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp for a whopping seven hours. For some people (myself) quite confronting to realize how much you are actually on your phone and perhaps even worse: that you really miss nothing if you leave that thing alone for seven hours. Others (whom I envy) had absolutely no trouble with it.

Did I really leave my phone completely alone? No way. I was fully engaged on Reddit, where it — of course — was also about that massive outage. And because I am very good at reading but absolutely not technically skilled, I was thoroughly enjoying the IT folks trying to figure out where this crash could have come from. Is someone going to be fired over there at Facebook HQ? Uh... Maybe, yes.

Because according to IT, there is actually no doubt: it is an internal, human error. What followed in the explanation was quite a bit of abracadabra for me, but I delved into it and will now try to explain it (well): when you type Facebook.com in your browser, it connects to a DNS server, which you can somewhat compare to the complete address book of the World Wide Web. That DNS server then directs you to the actual address of Facebook.

What went wrong: the information from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and their associated servers was removed from that ‘address book’. In other words, you typed in the address of Facebook and the DNS server responded with ‘What is Facebook?’ In other words... Complete. Wrong. Mess.

And how is it that the information on that DNS server was erased? Well, technically it could have been an external factor, but that chance is really minimal. Facebook manages their own DNS servers. So yesterday there was probably complete chaos there, because this problem could only be solved by sending experts there. This problem could not be fixed remotely, but really on-site.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Facebook employees couldn't even get into the office. What? Yes, their employee badges no longer worked because that system was down too. Holy shitballs, I would love to be a fly on the wall in the room with Mark Zuckerberg yesterday.

Or — and now we’re going into the conspiracy corner — did he already know about this? Because what you might not have read is that the Pandora papers have been released, where Facebook, to say the least, does not come off very well. These papers have exposed several world leaders due to the large sums of money they are raking in through dubious means. President Putin, but also Shakira and Elton John are mentioned. They allegedly have somewhat dubious offshore structures in their possession. Our Minister of Finance, Wopke Hoekstra, was also mentioned.

Is that all? NO. There is more. A former Facebook employee has handed over documents to the government and is also giving interviews on TV revealing how Facebook misleads the general public regarding misinformation, violence, and the spread of hate. If you want to see and read more about this (believe me: it’s a rabbit hole but very interesting), then check it out here. If you want a Too Long, Didn’t Read, I have that for you too: Facebook only cares about money.

Well, I always find these kinds of conspiracy theories very interesting, but in this case, it seems very unlikely to me that Mark Zuckerberg voluntarily loses a fortune like last night in an attempt to preserve his good name. But still... Maybe it’s good for me to delve a bit more into Facebook. And especially: to put that phone down a bit more often.