This is what likely caused Facebook’s outage - and why SA banks should be concerned

2019-07-04 -

Several global websites such as OkCupid, Buzzfeed and Medium have also experienced problems due to Cloudflare. Goldstuck believes Cloudflare is the likely cause as only parts of the social media platforms were affected, such as posting photos on Instagram, or sending voice notes on WhatsApp. “Social media networks make use of different DNS providers, and the DNS server of Cloudflare for the specific services on the platforms likely failed,” Goldstuck told Business Insider South Africa. A DNS server allows computer and mobile browsers to connect to website addresses, by rooting the correct information to the browser. “This is why, for example, users could not load photos as the DNS server was unable to send the correct information to the end user but users were still able to use their feeds.” Facebook, which owns and operates Instagram and WhatsApp, is yet to disclose the cause of their network issues. Goldstuck, with over thirty years of experience in the technology sector, said it is extremely worrying that an established company such as Cloudflare has experienced these repeated issues

While current outages have not affected essential services, Goldstuck believes the next outage may well hit emergency and financial services hosted online. He said South African financial services such as banks are especially prone to be hit by such an outage. “We don’t have much readiness in South Africa’s banking industry. To avoid a DNS outage heavily affecting a bank’s service it should have multiple points of entry outside of just online. We are just not seeing that with South African banks.” New South African banks such as TymeBank and Discovery Bank are almost exclusively hosted online. Goldstuck does not believe users’ personal data is at risk as a DNS outage does not give access to an individual’s information. He, however, said that cyber warfare teams in countries like North Korea would be prompted by the outages to treat DNS as a point of vulnerability that they could attack to bring digital government and financial services to a halt. www.vsoftsystems.co.za