MIT Technology Review reports:

One of the last messages that Vaiva Bezhan sent on Facebook Messenger on Monday afternoon, Central European Time, was a bit of a cliffhanger—and incredibly time sensitive.

The Lithuanian photojournalist is co-organizer of the Afghan Support Group, one of many volunteer initiatives trying by any means possible to help evacuate vulnerable Afghans in the wake of the Taliban takeover. She was writing to ask if she could add someone to a flight manifest for one of the few volunteer-coordinated evacuation flights still leaving the country.

But this crucial question would go unanswered for hours, after all Facebook’s services—including Facebook.com, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram—suddenly became unavailable from around 11:40 a.m. US Eastern time. The outage was due to changes to Facebook’s backbone routers, the firm said in a blog post. Those changes meant that traffic was not being handled properly by the Domain Name System (DNS), a tool that directs traffic and tracks addresses across the internet. In total, Facebook’s apps and sites were down for almost six hours.

For many internet users in the United States, the outage was a minor annoyance. But for the millions of people around the world who rely on Facebook’s products to access the internet, including Afghans that already feel abandoned by the international community’s withdrawal in mid-August, the sudden downtime was far more serious.

For much of the world, Facebook has become “synonymous with the internet,” says Sarah Aoun, vice president for security at the Open Technology Fund, a US nonprofit that supports technology projects like the private browser Tor and encrypted message service Signal. That made the outage the equivalent of nothing less than “a big infrastructure collapse,” she says. [Continue reading…]