As we progressively rely on social media to keep in contact with friends, stay up-to-date with the news and find funny videos, the prospect of being cut off is suitable to send us into consternation mode. Here are the three main reasons why social media platforms go down.
1. Leap Second
2012 leap second took Reddit down, among other platforms. Reddit is run on open source Linux OS, which nearly reduce to a halt after the leap second was added. The conflict was a subsystem in Linux. This subsystem is adopted when an application is relaxing and standing by for the operating system to accomplish another task.
Periodically, it sets an alarm time to wake the sleeping application if the OS is holding too long. When the leap second hit, these subsystems were a second ahead of the main OS. This made them ring the alarm clocks, waking up countless sleeping applications at once and overloading the systems’ CPUs.
2. Server Problems
In July 2015, several websites crashed, with Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix and Amazon going offline for 40 minutes, and thousands of others were troubled too.
Initially, the leap second bug had caught again, until the real reason appeared. These websites all rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which underwent a brief network disturbance on July 1st. Amazon hosts a huge number of websites (11.6 million as of May 2013), so any issues with AWS impact huge sections of the net.
When Amazon realized the connectivity issue was establishing such a big issue, they paused all requests to their servers to bring in additional capacity and restart the servers.
Mostly, they had to turn it off and on again. Luckily, the problem was resolved before the hour was out. Interpreting Instagram users were free to continue posting gorgeously filtered photos of their food before it even had the time to go cold.
3. Hackers
January 2015 saw Tinder Facebook and Instagram go down for about an hour, and this time, the reason was refused. Facebook criticized the problem on ‘a change that affected our configuration systems’. Some claimed that the huge hurricane that was crushing the US East Coast had knocked out its servers.
One other statement emerged 30 minutes into the outage, when a hacker group called Lizard Squad claimed authority for leading the world’s favorite social media sites down.
While Facebook denied the group were responsible, Lizard Squad have a history of attacks, bringing down Playstation and Xbox Live Network over Christmas 2014 via a DDoS attack.
What happens when social media platforms go down?
We have produced so used to being associated via social networks that their continuous supply is as important as electricity and oxygen for some people. The response combines outrage, shun and fun.
When Twitter was offline briefly in January 2015, users were quick to laugh at the support team who sent a tweet about the outage, which of course would not have been visible to anyone challenging problems.
Next time a social network goes down, we suggest staying calm, stepping away from the computer, and trying again in 30 minutes.
Social media networks hate going down for any amount of time, a lot of developers are running around in a horror while being yelled at. Before too long, the service should be up and running again, and normal life will resume.
