WhatsApp down: DNS error may have caused the blackout

The pang suffered by Facebook this Monday (4) is already considered by experts in the field of technology and digital security as the largest in the company's history. Since early this afternoon, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram services have been offline. So far, there has been no official statement from the company of Mark Zuckerberg on what would have motivated the breakdown and, from then on, several theories ranging from attacks hackers bankrupt have been popping up on the web. However, the greater probability is that the whole problem has a single culprit: the DNS.

What is DNS

Os Domain Name Systems (or DNS, its acronym in English) are responsible for translating the names typed in the browsers address bar (URLs) to the corresponding IP addresses. O IP (Internet Protocol, in English) is nothing more than a protocol that works similarly to a person's CPF. With it, it is possible for devices to be identified through a numerical sequence and connections to be established.

Think of the following example: at the end of the day you want to know what's new in the tech world, go to your browser's address bar and type www.showmetech.com.br. When you press enter to enter the address, the DNS servers come into operation and “translate” the address you typed into the IP (172.67.72.3, in the case of Showmetech) of the site. This process makes everyone's life easier, since memorizing so many numbers would, for most people, be impossible.

And how does the error happen?

The whole problem is caused when some failure happens on one of these servers, causing the IP address to go out of reach. Eventually, services and platforms may go down due to the problem, which is not that uncommon. In July of this year, for example, websites and system applications such as Airbnb e PlayStation were down due to a company DNS failure Akamai Technologies. Therefore, a failure in the midst of this entire process is considered the main reason for having WhatsApp offline this Monday.

Officially, Facebook has not yet explained what caused the collapse recorded on its platforms. In a statement released on the company's social networks, she only stated that “We are aware that some people are having problems accessing our apps and products. We are working to get things back to normal as soon as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”.

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Understand what happened to social media this monday.