

Ask HN: How can Facebook go down? - sdouglas

Surely Facebook&#x27;s server code and databases are replicated around the world, partly for redundancy and partly for faster content delivery. So presumably a datacenter to burn down (or a big storm can hit the US) and Facebook could keep ticking over. What, then, could cause the whole thing to go down? I&#x27;d love to hear people&#x27;s thoughts.<p>Perhaps the fault was with Akamai, but then my question really just changes to &#x27;How can Akamai go down?&#x27;
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SEJeff
Akamai is many many caching devices with fancy routing (massive
oversimplification). Announcing routes incorrectly, on purpose, or
maliciously, can cause entire swaths of the internet or entire countries to go
offline. It is sometimes called route poisoning or ip hijacking

A few examples:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_hijacking)
[https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/BGP+multiple+banking+addre...](https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/BGP+multiple+banking+addresses+hijacked/16249)
[http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/repeated-attacks-
hij...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/repeated-attacks-hijack-huge-
chunks-of-internet-traffic-researchers-warn/)

etc, etc.

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cr3ative
They blamed a configuration change gone wrong. If that was a change to their
core routers, deployed to everything at once (or just to some crucial parts
first, even), it's quite believable that they could take (public-facing, at
least) network down in one fell swoop.

