Earlier today you may have noticed that large portions of the internet just… broke. A bit like that episode of South Park. Major sites including Reddit, Twitch, Amazon, Spotify, the BBC, CNN, and even Tom’s Guide suddenly stopped working entirely or suffered problems with pages not displaying properly.
So what was that all about? Well it appears that the problem stemmed from an issue at one single service: namely content delivery network (CDN) provider Fastly. Here’s what you need to know.
A CDN refers to a group of servers that have been distributed over different geographic locations. These work in tandem to ensure fast delivery of internet content — which makes them pretty important services. Fastly happens to be one of the biggest of them, servicing huge numbers of major websites.
Fastly’s status page first noted there were problems happening at 5.58 ET, while promising to investigate the issue further. That problem was apparently identified at 5:55 ET, with a fix being implemented to end the disruption. Around this time affected websites and services slowly started coming back online.
Unfortunately this issue wasn’t localized, and Fastly reported that this was a global outage, meaning it affected everyone from New York to Sydney and everywhere else in between.
While we typically like to think of the internet as this intangible platform floating around in the cloud, it is still completely reliant on physical hardware to operate properly. If a problem occurs with some of this hardware, be it a server farm, the network cabling connecting everything together, or something else entirely, outages can and do occur.
(developing)
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