JOIN USExplained | Why several global websites faced an outage
Swathes of the internet remained unavailable on Tuesday after an apparent widespread outage at the cloud service company, Fastly.
Visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: "Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com." and similar errors were reported across various affected websites.
Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, said: "Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service."
What is Fastly?
Fastly is a cloud computing service provider widely used by dozens of high-traffic websites, including but not limited to The New York Times, CNN, Twitch and the UK government's website.
It operates an edge cloud platform that brings websites to servers closer to those accessing trying to access it. So, if you are in India and trying to access a website hosted in the United States, the company brings some of the content on the website to a server located closer to you, optimising website load times and high-payload content. This network is also called a Content Delivery Network.
What went wrong?
Fastly, on its status update webpage, said at 1000 UTC that the company was investigating a "potential impact to performance" with their CDN services. At 1044 UTC, the company said that they had identified the issue and a fix was implemented.
"We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online," the company said on Twitter.
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
At 1057 UTC, the company said a fix had been applied and that customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.
Why did it affect so many websites?
The service provider sits between back-end web servers and the users, hence any issues with the service will cause entire websites to remain inaccessible to consumers.
(With inputs from agencies)
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