so uh. what on earth happened to the internet while we were away most of today
-F

@Felthry seems like someone at Facebook pushed a bad BGP config that ended up making all the world's computers forget what servers "facebook.com" should direct to, including their own internal systems. This resulted in everything that relied on Facebook - from WhatsApp and Oculus to (for some bizzare reason) the smart door locks in FB's buildings - ceasing to function, and then a bit later everything that would ping FB for stuff started essentially DDoSing DNS services as they tried desperately to connect.

@Felthry It stands for "Border Gateway Protocol"; I'm not *super* certain on what exactly it is, but it seems to be part of the system that tells the world what IP address a URL refers to. It's also a system that can take a bad config uploaded in one place and propagate it to the entire world, such as what happened in 2008 when Pakistan tried to block domestic traffic to Youtube:
abcnews.go.com/Technology/stor

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