Learn from Facebook Inc.

The Day the World Went Dark
How a Configuration Change Crippled Facebook

In 2019, a seemingly routine configuration update brought Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to their knees for nearly a day. Incident Drill helps your team prepare for and prevent similar catastrophic outages.

Facebook Inc. | 2019 | Outage (Config)

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The Ever-Present Threat of Configuration Errors

Configuration errors are a leading cause of outages, and they are often difficult to predict and even harder to debug under pressure. A single misconfiguration can trigger a cascade of failures, impacting millions of users and costing companies millions in lost revenue.

PREPARE YOUR TEAM

Incident Drill: Practice Makes Perfect

Incident Drill provides a realistic, hands-on environment for your engineering team to practice responding to incidents like the Facebook outage. By simulating these scenarios, your team will learn to identify root causes faster, communicate effectively, and mitigate the impact of future incidents.

⏱️

Realistic Simulations

Experience the pressure of a real outage without the real-world consequences.

🤝

Team Collaboration

Practice communication and coordination under stress.

🔍

Root Cause Analysis

Develop your skills in identifying and resolving complex issues.

📈

Performance Tracking

Measure your team's progress and identify areas for improvement.

📚

Post-Incident Reviews

Learn from your mistakes and improve your incident response process.

🛡️

Proactive Prevention

Identify vulnerabilities and prevent future incidents before they happen.

WHY TEAMS PRACTICE THIS

Transform Your Team's Incident Response

✓ Reduce downtime and minimize impact
✓ Improve team communication and collaboration
✓ Enhance root cause analysis skills
✓ Strengthen incident response procedures
✓ Identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities
✓ Build a culture of learning and continuous improvement

Facebook Family Outage - Simplified Timeline

11:30 AM PST

Configuration change deployed to backbone network.

11:45 AM PST

Network partition begins, internal services become unavailable.

12:00 PM PST

Engineers attempt remote access, but DNS resolution fails.

1:00 PM PST

Physical access required, engineers dispatched to data center.

6:00 PM PST

Services gradually restored.

7:00 PM PST

Outage fully resolved.

How It Works

Step 1: Simulate

Run a realistic simulation of the Facebook outage.

Step 2: React

Your team responds as if it's a real incident.

Step 3: Analyze

Review the team's performance and identify areas for improvement.

Step 4: Improve

Refine your incident response process and prevent future outages.

EXPLORE MORE

Related Incidents

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The Day the World Went DarkHow a Configuration Change Crippled Facebook