On Facebook

Structural risks to the Internet

Right in the middle of writing a series about systemic risks to the Internet, Facebook, and all of its services, collapsed globally.

I’ll keep this brief.

Nick Merrill @_elsehow

as far as structural outages go, this FB thing is relatively minor. a few hundreds of millions of dollars lost at most. if a similar outage hit AWS, cloudflare, akamai, etc, no one's credit card would work. i expect the losses would be in the billions if not trillions.

Facebook facilitates a tremendous volume of economic and social activity. It's a critical infrastructure provider. But it isn't regulated like one.¹ At what cost? We'll soon see. Once we get numbers on this outage, it'll be easier to advocate for oversight.

I anticipate more events like this in the future, but bigger and more frequent, generated by increasing tussle over core Internet infrastructure. How do we assess the risk of—and make plans to mitigate the fallout from—these types of events? We’ll return to that topic on Friday.

A warm welcome to all the new readers.

1. Facebook manages BGP configurations the way a telecom company would. But CISA monitors telecom providers closely. Meanwhile, it seems Facebook can push out misconfigured BGP without anyone catching the error.