If the internet were to vanish, many of us would be at a loss – work and leisure activities heavily rely on it. Early this morning, a significant portion of internet users experienced a taste of a world without the internet as several major websites worldwide became inaccessible. The blackout affected popular sites like The New York Times, Reddit, Hulu, Amazon, Twitch, Spotify, and the UK government’s website, sparking panic among users.
The culprit behind this widespread outage was traced back to a software failure within Fastly, a prominent content delivery network (CDN) that optimizes website performance by providing cloud computing cache. An erroneous software update within Fastly’s system caused a massive portion of its network to collapse, rendering most of the websites it supports inoperable.
A service configuration issue led to disruptions across our global framework. We have rectified the issue and are gradually restoring our network. For updates, visit https://t.co/RIQWX0LWwl
— Fastly (@fastly) June 8, 2021
Fortunately, Fastly’s technicians swiftly identified and resolved the issue, restoring normalcy to most affected sites within an hour. Despite the brief interruption, the incident shed light on both the vulnerability and resilience of network infrastructure.
“No network is flawless, so the true test lies in how quickly major internet players like Fastly can recover from such rare outages,” stated Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik. “In this instance, the recovery time was less than an hour.”
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