Internet Disruption Caused by Fastly Malfunction Spreads Widely

Without exaggeration, if the internet were to vanish unexpectedly, I would be at a loss. Both professional responsibilities and personal entertainment heavily rely on a functional internet connection. So, if I can’t engage in either, what alternatives exist? Venturing outside and reading books? The mere thought is unsettling. Fortunately, the internet remains intact, but earlier today, a significant portion of internet users experienced a glimpse of a potential outage scenario.

In the early hours of the morning, approximately at 5:40 AM Eastern time, a vast array of websites scattered worldwide abruptly became entirely unreachable. The affected sites spanned various sectors, including The New York Times, Reddit, Hulu, Amazon, Twitch, Spotify, and even the official website of the UK government. Panic ensued as users scrambled to identify the root cause.

Ultimately, the culprit was a software glitch within the infrastructure of Fastly, a prominent content delivery network (CDN) that operates across the global web. Fastly’s primary role comprises offering cloud computing cache services to numerous websites, enhancing their speed and shielding them from traffic surges that may lead to DDoS attacks. An erroneous software update within Fastly’s system caused approximately three-quarters of its network to malfunction, resulting in the affected sites and applications slowing down to the point of inaccessibility.

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

Thankfully, Fastly’s technical team swiftly identified the issue, and within an hour, services were restored to normal, although there were some minor delays due to the recovery process. This incident has raised awareness about the vulnerability of network infrastructures, underscoring the competence of those responsible for its management.

“No network is without errors, so the true test lies in how efficiently a major internet entity like Fastly can recover from an uncommon outage such as this,” remarked Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik. “In this instance, the resolution was achieved within an hour.”