Swathes of the internet, including Amazon, Reddit and numerous news outlets, were taken offline on Tuesday following an issue plaguing a relatively obscure cloud computing company.
Dozens of major websites and hundreds in total were made inaccessible when Fastly started experiencing issues, leaving the government domain gov.uk, Twitch streaming services and Spotify down for over an hour.
Some feared hackers were responsible for the disruption, but it emerged that an issue with Fastly was behind the international wave of outages.
What is Fastly?
Fastly was founded by developer Arthur Bergman in 2011 and has become a crucial part of the technology that underpins today’s internet use. It is a content delivery network that sells security and tools to other large companies to help them deliver their content to users faster.
Essentially, Fastly’s tools aim to ensure that web pages are delivered reliably to users as quickly as possible.
In 2017, it launched an “edge cloud platform” that allows users to access non-based sites close to their place of residence. It does this by speeding up load times by efficiently storing certain content on servers closer to users.
Fastly’s website says it helped Buzzfeed load 50pc pages faster, while its tools allowed the New York Times manage the 2 million readers who read its website on election night last November.
Mark Hendry of Legal Firm DWF explains:
Quickly provide content delivery network services to businesses. The intention of these networks is to route Internet traffic and services through “nodes” to balance the traffic load, avoid bottlenecks, and enable high availability and faster content delivery.
Requests for content are driven by an algorithm, for example the algorithm can direct traffic to go through the most available or best performing node, or for traffic to take the fastest network route to the requester . This is the reason why some Internet users do not report any problem accessing content that is inaccessible to others.
What went wrong with Fastly?
Fastly first reported an issue on its service status page at 10:58 am, warning, “We are currently investigating the potential impact on the performance of our CDN services. “
Just over 45 minutes later, he added, “The problem has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”
At this point, the parts of the internet that were still working were lit with reports of the problems.
At 12:09 p.m., he wrote on Twitter:
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Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
This notice was published: 2021-06-08 15:20:44
