It is quite wrong to describe Facebook as a company that only owns WhatsApp and Instagram and provides social media services. Laying its own internet cables under the Pacific Ocean, this company is a monopoly that controls most of the world’s traffic. That’s why the 7-hour crash on the night of October 4 caused “problems” even for services that were on paper not affiliated with Facebook.
An analysis published by Thousand Eyes contains important information about the collapse of Facebook. This information simultaneously explains the connection problems experienced by Türk Telekom users. Türk Telekom and other Internet Service Provider (ISP) companies were affected by the crash for several reasons. Let’s look at these reasons together.
1. Facebook is not just social media; It also owns most of the traffic on internet networks: What does that mean?
A graphic of Facebook’s cable line laying on the Pacific Ocean floor between the continents of North America and Asia
On the night of October 4, users, facebook. com and other websites (and connected applications) within the company, they sent requests to DNS servers as usual. These requests were left unanswered on the Facebook front; because Facebook’s DNS servers were inaccessible, the company almost disappeared from the internet.
Türk Telekom and other companies responded negatively to these queries made by users, as they could not access Facebook servers. Of course, users have experienced this problem in the form of dinosaurs appearing in Chrome, Instagram posts that do not load, WhatsApp messages that do not arrive, and they involuntarily attribute the problem to companies that allow them to connect to the Internet.
2. Türk Telekom and other service providers are not accustomed to heavy traffic in times of crisis:
We can compare what happened on the night of Facebook’s collapse to the network density experienced in natural disasters. Do you remember how, after the earthquake in Istanbul on September 26, 2019, the GSM operators in Turkey were disabled because they could not meet the intense communication needs? Technically a GSM connection and an internet connection are completely different events, but what is similar here is user behavior.
On the night of the crash, users sent up to 4 times more requests to Facebook servers than usual to understand the situation, just like in natural disaster crises. For this reason, the traffic density in the network has exceeded the traffic at any given moment. Moreover, this took hours. Users have seriously increased the number of these requests by closing and opening Facebook’s applications, refreshing the page. According to analysis by Thousand Eyes, Facebook’s CTO had to report the stress on the network to his technical team due to popular demand. This density in the networks caused service providers to encounter abnormal demand, and from time to time to experience congestion in their services.
We also explained what happened during the collapse in the video below:
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