[Fury]

Ah, from arstechnica.com (am increasingly strident site regarding vaccinations):

“The root cause of the worldwide outage appears to be a flubbed BGP route update.”

That’s why the Facebook’s DNS servers can’t be found.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/10/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-and-oculus-are-down-heres-what-we-know/

If true, it’s going to take time to heal.

[Mr. Jeeves]

According to u/ramenporn—who claims to be a Facebook employee and part of the recovery efforts—this is most likely a case of Facebook network engineers pushing a config change that inadvertently locked them out, meaning that the fix must come from data center technicians with local, physical access to the routers in question. The withdrawn routes do not appear to be the result of nor related to any malicious attack on Facebook's infrastructure.

Unintentional internal sabotage is the most effective kind. :)

[Fury]

Router updates during the middle of the day for most of your customers just scares the crapskies out of me.

Sounds like the updates were done remotely and they locked themselves out of access to the routers needed to correct the problem.

Even rubes like us use OpenGear to get remote access to devices we can’t reach if the Interwebs are down. Cradepoint makes good products also.

[higgmeister]

“The root cause of the worldwide outage appears to be a flubbed BGP route update.”

Not Flubbed.   Intentional hacked and deleted leaving no administrative way to restore the routes.   This may have been an inside job.