If you found your favourite website offline on Wednesday, it was due to Fastly going down for over an hour. Major websites such as Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, and Twitch were affected, along with a host of news sites that relied on Fastly. The outage started at around 09:47 UTC (15:17 IST) and persisted for about an hour and a half before services were restored. One would think that it would take a massive cyberattack to pull off an Internet outage of such a scale, but the reality is far from it. A bug in the system, combined with one user changing their configuration bought the CDN down to its knees, it seems. Fastly had the following to say:
“We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change. We detected the disruption within one minute, then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal. This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.”
So, just what is a CDN and why is it an integral part of the Internet as we know it. CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It uses a network of servers that cache content across the globe. It cuts down the time required to access resources from a webpage significantly. For example, if you were to access a website based in the UK, it would involve back and forth transfer from a machine located there. That would slow things down, as a lot of data needs to go back and forth. However, a CDN located in, let’s say, New Delhi, will make things a lot quicker as your device only needs to connect with the New Delhi machine for resources.
Fastly is back up. So, now you can check out more news about the other upcoming smartphones as well as popular product recommendations on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages and head to our YouTube channel for the latest videos.
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