What is the internet — CCA-F Exam Prep

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Real story
A dark Facebook headquarters. Engineers crowding around laptops in a war room. On a whiteboard: a network diagram with a giant red X through it. Phones buzzing everywhere. October 4, 2021.

On October 4, 2021, Facebook disappeared.

Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger -- all gone. 3.5 billion people lost access for 6 hours. Employees couldn't badge into buildings. Internal tools were dead. They had to send engineers to the data center in person.

The cause: a single misconfigured routing update. One command told the internet to forget every path to Facebook's servers.

The internet didn't break. Facebook told the internet to forget where it lived.