Fastly outage: Just one customer caused internet problems which sent Reddit, Amazon and Guardian website down
2 min readThe major internet outage that knocked some of the world’s most-visited websites offline was caused by an undiscovered software bug, the company behind the issue has confirmed.
Fastly, a US-based edge cloud computing business that provides other companies with a content delivery network (CDN), said the bug was triggered by one of its customers making a configuration change, causing a “broad and severe” global outage.
Visitors to Amazon, Reddit, PayPal, the Guardian, Financial Times and UK government websites, among others, were met with error messages for around an hour on Tuesday morning.
The bug caused around 85 per cent of Fastly’s network to display error messages, said Nick Rockwell, the company’s senior vice president of engineering and infrastructure, adding that 95 per cent of the network was up and running again within 49 minutes of its engineers being alerted to the problem.
“This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them,” he said.
Content delivery networks rely on servers scattered across the world working in unison to deliver internet content more quickly, including images, videos, HTML pages and files, and serve the vast majority of web traffic for the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Facebook.
When working correctly, they can improve a website’s loading time and security while reducing the cost of bandwidth, meaning organisations are able to pay less to host websites.
Fastly will investigate why the bug was not uncovered during its previous testing processes and continue rolling out the fix across its network as safely as possible, Mr Rockwell said.
“Even though there were specific conditions that triggered this outage, we should have anticipated it,” he added.
“We provide mission-critical services, and we treat any action that can cause service issues with the utmost sensitivity and priority.
“We apologise to our customers and those who rely on them for the outage and sincerely thank the community for its support.”