Most Important Facts You May Not Know About Facebook's Outage?

In October 2021, Facebook experienced a problem. Everyone was aware of it. even those who were cave dwellers. Because it's likely that you use Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to communicate wherever you are.

The effect? We all worked quite hard for six hours. Because Facebook,  Instagram, and WhatsApp were unavailable for six hours.

Facebook blamed the outage on incorrect router configuration changes made by the firm. This begs the question of how safe an average firm is without Facebook's financial or technological resources, and whether something similar to what happened to Facebook could happen to them.

Recently, Dawid Kowalski, Senior Technical Director, EMEA, FireMon, and Amar Singh, CEO and co-founder of Cyber Management Alliance, collaborated to find answers to this topic as well as others about the Facebook outage.

The two cybersecurity experts deconstructed some intriguing elements of the issue that we can all learn from in a webinar titled "What You Don't Know About Facebook's Outage?"

Important subjects discussed in the webinar:

1. What exactly occurred during the blackout?
2. Was the outage "good" or "bad"?
3. the actual danger posed by such outages.
4. How might such disruptions be avoided?

Don't underestimate how easily cyber security fundamentals can entirely destroy your organization, was the main message of the webinar. It's not usually the highly skilled Nation State actors who will harm your reputation or financial situation. Sometimes, a straightforward human error or a flawed method might be just as harmful.

And it was detrimental to Facebook. Every second of downtime costs businesses the size of Facebook millions of dollars.

For the majority of consumers, this particular outage was virtually astonishing. Even the "Login with Facebook" feature, which millions rely on to access other apps, was unavailable. Due to the inability of businesses to promote on Facebook and Instagram, the company lost an estimated $100 million in

advertising income. Shares of Facebook decreased by 5%, which implies that $40 billion was lost in a matter of hours!

What precisely caused the Facebook outage, then?

As was already stated, the change management procedure was flawed.

Every organization, according to Dawid's explanation in the webinar, should have a change management approach in place. But sometimes all these transformation processes are a checkbox exercise. These procedures frequently don't simulate or analyze what will occur if that change is done. Facebook most likely also failed there.

The outage "impacted several of the internal tools and systems," the business claimed in its announcement.

Many companies nowadays, like Facebook, attempt to develop internal tools, but since they aren't experts in doing so, there are invariably some defects and some areas that are still unexplored. The IT team makes a quick effort to act in this situation. When processes are not followed correctly, problems arise when people try to fix something that is already broken.

In the case of Facebook, a straightforward maintenance or configuration update caused Facebook to produce waves and generate news throughout the world.

During the webinar, Dawid offered a brief outline of how he thought this had occurred. Facebook had prepared for change; but, the scripts they used to assess the modification's risks failed to identify the issue. Many individuals assume that because the modification had a minor impact—removing some network connectivity within the environment—that they didn't actually have the scripts for that particular type of change.

What do we need to know to manage change effectively?

Although configuration management and change management may seem like dull subjects, they are actually incredibly crucial. It can be a significant issue if improperly handled and tested, as was the case with the aforementioned outage.

All networks and environments in the current environment began as much smaller networks with a single switch before evolving into numerous switches. Multiple firewalls are developed from a single firewall.

Therefore, it is difficult for a human to analyze any planned change. For a human to complete it and match it up with the security standards would be an enormous task.

When attempting to analyze a change, the human factor must be removed, as the two experts pointed out in the webinar. Human is aware that a change must be done, and that should be the extent of their involvement. Automation that can manage the complexity of IT and cyber is therefore required. Humans will fail if automation isn't present.

Complexity, visibility, human, and automation are the four important concepts for successful change management. In the event of a Facebook-like outage, these 4 phrases succinctly describe the issue and its resolution.

How can your business be protected from network outages?

Network disruptions are typically caused by incorrect configuration. In essence, conventional methods for maintaining network security policy limit your company's capacity for innovation and change.

The experts on the webinar recommended the following five strategies for defending your company against a similar network outage:

1. Examine your security procedures & make repairs
2. Automate security to simplify and hasten it
3. Obtain network visibility across cloud and on-premises environments.
4. Before you implement changes to security policy, consider their effects in advance.
5. Integrate your security tools to increase the effectiveness of each.

Amar concluded by restating how important it is to integrate the technology stack. When it comes to network security, you are at the mercy of luck if you are unable to automate, integrate, and visualize.

The network security policy platform you select should be adaptable and able to secure your networks as they get larger and more complex while preserving desirable procedures. Visibility and scalability are crucial.

Is this particular outage regarded as a "good" one?

Although no outage can be described as "good," this one isn't technically categorized as "evil" because it wasn't brought on by nefarious outsiders.

A ransomware assault or any other attack that results in a data breach or the loss of customer data would normally be considered a bad outage.

According to experts, the Facebook outage was "positive" because there was no data compromise and it was a valuable lesson for everyone even somewhat interested in cybersecurity

Thanks & Regards

Nikhil Kanojia

Blogger-Digital Marketer.

Hacktechmedia.com