This morning suffered one of the largest internet outages that affected a handful of websites, some of which included some pretty big names. Luckily, we weren’t a part of this outage but many others were, including Google, Amazon, various news websites, political and government sites, and more.
At first, you may think this was the doing of an evil digital terrorist group looking to wreak havoc on the world. However, this wasn’t the case (thankfully). Instead, this was caused by an outage at Fastly, an internet CDN service that services thousands of websites, over two thousand of which are paying customers.
When Fastly experienced the outage, it brought down all of the websites that rely upon it to serve content geographically to users online (normally speeding up the browsing experience of each of those websites). Another example of how complicated, yet still very fragile the internet is as websites and businesses consistently seek collaborative ways to keep up with the traffic coming to them.
Thankfully, the outage lasted just less than an hour before everything was quickly brought back online around 6:30 AM (EST). The timing of it was also a godsend (at least for people within the PST through EST zones). Hopefully, Fastly not only identified what the cause was but was able to find ways of preventing it from happening in the future.
