Why was Facebook down? Speculation about a hack, deleted code rampant but few firm answers

Facebook, along with its subsidiaries Instagram and Whatsapp, went down at from roughly 11:45 a.m, until 6 p.m. and there has been no official comment from the tech giant as to why this is.Users have reported being unable to access Facebook across North and South America, Europe and Asia.Many have theorized as to why this has happened. A problem with its Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) being one of the most prevalent.Cloudflare Vice President Dane Knecht was one of the first to voice this hypothesis.“It appears their BGP routes have been withdrawn from the internet,” she tweeted Monday.Rather than using a third-party BGP like Cloudflare, Facebook started using its own BGP with all its social media companies, Whatsapp, Messenger and Instagram.The issue came from an update of Facebook’s BGP. however, the company failed to secure its addresses, or routes back to its pages. Large sections of the routing codes have been deleted.Simply put, think of a BGP as the postal service of the Internet. When someone submits data across the Internet, BGP is responsible for looking at all of the available paths that data could travel and picking the best route.These routes are no longer there.One reason for this, a software…
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