The day Facebook deleted itself from the internet
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp gone globally for ~6 hours. Internal tools, badge access and conference systems were down too, slowing recovery.
A safety mechanism reacting to a bigger failure can amplify it. Watch for circular dependencies where the tools to fix an outage are taken out by it.
A routine backbone-maintenance command, meant to assess capacity, accidentally severed all backbone connections between data centers.
Meta's DNS servers withdrew their BGP routes when they lost backbone reachability — a designed safety reflex. With DNS unreachable, every property vanished, and the very tools needed to fix it were on the network that was down.
Treat DNS and network routing as critical dependencies. Keep recovery tools available when the production network is down.
