An outage that kept many people from accessing Facebook and Instagram on Wednesday was caused by a particular type of routing issue known as a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) leak, according to network management firm Netscout.
Why it matters: Though not malicious in nature, such problems can lead to widespread issues, as was the case for Facebook.
Such issues stem from the fact that the Internet isn’t a single network, but rather a network of networks. The BGP routes traffic between those networks.
According to Axios cybersecurity reporter Joe Uchill, BGP is notoriously both insecure and easy to mess up by accident. If 1 server underestimates how many network hops away from another server it is, suddenly, huge swaths of the internet can be redirected through an inconvenient place.
Google had a BGP issue last year that took down the site for some users.
