The outage affected dozens of countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia, as well as South Africa. Fastly said it had identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across its servers. The company has disabled that configuration.
What is Fastly?
Fastly helps improve load times for websites and provides other services to internet sites, apps and platforms — including a large global server network designed to smooth out traffic overloads that can crash websites, such as a denial-of-service attack. The service accomplishes that by storing content and aspects of websites and apps on servers that are physically closer to the users trying to access a particular site or platform.
But because Fastly provides a layer of support between internet companies and customers trying to access the various online platforms it services, when it goes down, access to those platforms can be blocked entirely.
When Fastly went down, it went down hard: Three-quarters of the traffic coming from Fastly disappeared at around 5:49 am ET, to Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik, a cloud company that provides large companies according to internet transmission records. Traffic began returning at about 6:39 am ET.
Why did Fastly’s outage take the internet down, too?
Companies that operate on the internet can switch content delivery networks — and some appeared able to bypass Fastly’s outage Tuesday morning. But that’s not always an easy or quick proposition.
Major website and app issues happen from time to time and typically don’t last long — internet service providers, content delivery networks and other hosting services are built with multiple redundancies and a global network of backup servers designed to reduce disruptions when things go haywire.
“There is no error-free internet, so the measure of success is how quickly a major internet firm like Fastly can recover from a rare outage like this,” Madory said. “In this case, it was under an hour.”
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