Last week, a curious thing happened. About twenty four hours after a whistleblower spoke about the algorithms Facebook and it’s associated
properties used and a member of the team rebutted these claims, an outage occurred. Facebook, WhatsApp, Oculous and Instagram all went down for nearly and entire day, and speculation ran rampant as to the cause. We have witnessed massive ransomware hacks, on police departments, sports teams, and infrastructure this year. One had to wonder, was Facebook, a company worth the GDP of many countries that possesses Pentagon level cyber security, compromised to a level in which it couldn’t operate? According to internal sources at Facebook, that wasn’t the case. In fact, it was an issue that happens more frequently then cyber attacks, a DNS server error.
DNS stands for Domain Name Systems. DNS handles many things. The main one is that it allows for computers to translate words in domain names
into numerical data that allows for computers to connect to one another, the internet, and their network. This data is what is referred to as an IP address.
The server translates the requests and sends the user to the appropriate server in the network or on the internet. DNS was created to make the internet easier to use for everyday people. Instead of having to type a set of seemingly random numbers into a toolbar to navigate to a web page or to an internal server, DNS was created to allow the usage of words to get people to their virtual destination. Originally, these arraignments were made by hand, but as the demand and connectivity to the internet grew, it was obvious that was not a system that would work for everyday people.
DNS serves as a way to handle the growing navigational needs of our digital world. The DNS directory is a worldwide directory, stored in it’s
own special servers called dns servers. These servers are interconnected to one another and connected to the internet at large, synchronizing directory
information and making it available to servers around the world.
Internal DNS servers can fail, and when they do, it can shut down enterprises. Last Mondays outage not only blocked access to Facebook and
it’s associated platforms for millions of users, but internally at Facebook it shut down communications. For those who were not logged into their work
stations, they were locked out until the issue was fixed. For others who were logged in before the crash, they were unable to communicate with one another. This compounded the problems faced by Facebook consumers, as the very people who were supposed to be working to get the network back online were unable to communicate via their terminals. In fact, it also locked many at their main campus out of the facilities entirely as the security doors reading the key cards couldn’t communicate with the main server. If Facebook was a house, it was on fire, 911 couldn’t answer the call and the water lines were down.
The culprit for this appears to have been an update to their network that wiped out all of the DNS information that Facebook and it’s properties used for the internet to find Facebook, and it’s consumers suffered as a result. They weren’t the only ones, in six hours Facebook lost 60 million dollars or 222,000 dollars a minute. Facebook may have been able to withstand these outages, but for many companies an outage can spell impending doom. If you are a business owner, you know that downtime is the enemy. How do you prevent an outage? Well, truth of the matter is they are avoidable, not preventable. Making sure you have a DNS network that can handle the volume you need it to is a key component. Load balancing can help split the traffic between servers as to not overwhelm them. There are more procedures, however, if you aren’t a tech minded individual, these are things that may be hard to implement and may not make much sense.
This is where having a strong MSP to run your network comes in. Partnering with an MSP such as the folks at Delval Technology Solutions can
help you alleviate your concerns and ensure that your DNS servers don’t fail. An MSP offers expert level network management and guidance, at a fraction of the cost of hiring an in house team. For more information, feel free to contact us while you are here, or set an appointment and see all of the things an MSP can do for you.