But the FB outage was not a configuration change.
> a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network
> a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network
"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication.
...
Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear that there was no malicious activity behind this outage — its root cause was a faulty configuration change on our end."
Ultimately, that faulty command changed router configuration globally.
The Google outage was triggered by a configuration change due to an automation system gone rogue. But hey, it too was triggered by a human issuing a command at some point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijst4g5KFN0
This is a presentation to students by an MIT professor that goes over exactly what happened, the sequence of events, mistakes made, and so on.