If you woke up early Tuesday morning thinking of getting your productivity on, you might’ve been disappointed. Major online sites, such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Reddit, Amazon, and even Twitch were down.
The sites were inaccessible for about an hour, with little known as to what had happened to major players on the internet. Turns out, one of the reasons could be down to a relatively unknown company: Fastly.
Fastly, a cloud computing services firm, had suffered a configuration problem that in turn caused the widespread blackout.
How did this happen? Well, Fastly is a content delivery network (CDN), meaning it runs some of the biggest servers around the world that fuel the internet. One key task of a CDN is to speed up the internet by caching webpages on servers physically closer to the user’s location, according to Input.
At 5:58am ET, Fastly said that it was “currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.”
About an hour later, at 7am, it tweeted that the firm had identified the cause of the service disruptions, and the blacked-out sites were soon restored.
Even though the issue was resolved in a rather timely manner, many across the globe found it shocking that just one service disruption could take down so many of the internet’s top sites.
Perhaps the big players will have to find ways to diversify so that all of the web’s major sites won’t just fall on one firm.
We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online. Continued status is available at https://t.co/RIQWX0LWwl
— Fastly (@fastly) June 8, 2021
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