On Tuesday, a failure at Fastly, a service that helps websites load pages quicker, knocked out large sections of the internet.
The hour-long outage at Fastly Inc. served as a stark reminder of how vulnerable the world’s most popular websites are to disruptions ranging from simple human mistake to orchestrated cyberattack.
On Tuesday, a breakdown at Fastly, a service that helps websites load pages quicker, knocked out large sections of the internet.
CNN, the New York Times, and Bloomberg News, as well as businesses like Amazon.com Inc., Shopify Inc., and Stripe Inc., as well as popular sites like Spotify and Reddit, all went offline. Digital government services in the United Kingdom were also unavailable for a while.
According to Downdetector, which analyses service outages, major sites began reporting problems around 10:30 a.m. U.K. time on Tuesday.
According to the company, a valid software configuration update made by one of its clients triggered a previously unknown fault that was introduced during a May 12 software rollout.
Fastly immediately detected a problem with their content delivery network and issued a patch in 46 minutes after becoming aware of the issue. Soon after, the sites began to come back to life.
Fastly’s senior vice president of engineering and infrastructure, Nick Rockwell, stated in a blog post, “This outage was broad and severe, and we’re really sorry for the harm to our customers and everyone who relies on them.”
Nonetheless, a web-wide chain of failures turned a simple “service setting” into a global outage that impacted both huge corporations and individual consumers.
The content universe is rapidly expanding.
It wasn’t always like this: in earlier versions of the internet, a simple website comprised of a few pages of text and images, all of which were hosted on a single web server with its own IP address. An internet service provider directed a user request to that specific computer in order to gain access to that site.
That system still works, but bigger enterprises are finding it increasingly difficult to distribute digital content due to the rapid, exponential growth of digital material. According to research published by analyst firm IDC in May, more data will be generated in the next three years than has been generated in the previous three decades combined.
That system still works, but bigger enterprises are finding it increasingly difficult to distribute digital content due to the rapid, exponential growth of digital material. According to research published by analyst firm IDC in May, more data will be generated in the next three years than has been generated in the previous three decades combined.
A distributed denial-of-service attack and a content delivery network failure are commonly confused by users. Each can result in a “server not found” message or a blank page, preventing the user from accessing the site. More malicious hacks hijack websites in an attempt to extort users with ransomware.
