4 reasons Facebook went down so badly last week

Packet switched networks were designed to withstand a nuclear attack. However, a series of mistakes triggered by a command that slipped through the auditing tools caused a global outage of Facebook on the 4th of Oct 2021, which is estimated to have temporarily cost 47 billion in market cap of the company, on top of a revenue loss between 60 and 100 million. More importantly, such events reveal how vulnerable our society has become to complex software systems. In this blog post we review the causes that triggered Facebook’s outage and the known facts about it. We will follow up in a second post with a plea for BGP change validation, a key technology to make BGP networks more resilient.

Code BGP’s inauguration post

This is our inauguration article in the Code BGP blog! It explains the reasons we created Code BGP, our personal journeys that brought us here, what we plan to do with Code BGP, why we believe we bring value to the network operations landscape, what we aim to provide to our customers and the community at large, and what is our vision for the future. It's a 5 minute read.