Everything About the ‘Internet Downtime’ Caused by Fastly Summarised For You

Yesterday, a devastating tragedy shook the world.

Reader: Oh no, has another pandemic emerged? Has World War 3 begun?

Worse, there was a massive internet outage yesterday.

Reader: *gasps*

Yesterday, sites like Reddit, Twitch, and Spotify went down, and humans around the world had no choice but to look up from their phones and have conversations with one another.

It was traumatising.

So, what caused this massive internet outage? Well, we have a company called Fastly to thank, and no, we’re not trying to be funny with the words fastly or anyhowly.

What is Fastly?

Fastly is a cloud computing services provider which offers a content delivery network, or CDN.

A CDN refers to a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of internet content.

The majority of web traffic across the world today is routed through CDNs. It’s actually designed to combat common causes of online outages.

Companies like Netflix, Facebook, and Amazon, rely on CDNs to host their content closer to where that content is to be consumed.

This way, customers can get their content faster, or fastly, amiright?

Reader: That was terrible

These CDNs also protect companies against traffic spikes, among other things.

Most major websites use CDNs. Heck, even minor and useless ones like Goody Feed use a CDN as it’ll load our website (and app) fastly.

What Caused the Outage?

Since Fastly provides support between internet companies and customers trying to access these platforms, when it goes down, access to those platforms can be blocked.

People initially suspected that Fastly was the victim of a cyberattack, but they have since denied this and provided an explanation for the outage.

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

As you can see, the firm had “identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions” across its machines around the world.

Fortunately, the issue has since been fixed.

“The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” the company said.

Lest you’re not aware, “service configuration” is a very common and general error.

Who Were Affected?

According to CNN, the outage affected dozens of countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and South Africa.

Sites and apps including HBO Max, Pinterest, and even the UK’s official government website was affected.

Similar Outage in 2020

A similar internet outage occurred in Aug 2020 when CenturyLink, another content delivery network, went down.

Since its job is to keep websites up and running, many sites like Discord, Hulu, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, and even League of Legends, to name a few, went down along with it.

Fortunately, the internet is back now, and we can finally stop talking to other people.

Reader: Phew