For anyone that tried using the internet during the morning on June 8, 2021, they likely had a difficult time accessing many of the web’s most popular sites. Why? Thanks to an outage from cloud computing company Fastly, a large chunk of the internet went offline for over an hour.
The internet is one of those things that people expect to work all the time. If someone goes to Twitter, YouTube, or any other website, they anticipate it to load and function as it always does. While things typically work like normal, this doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, this results from an ISP like Comcast being down, or it can be related to someone’s individual router acting up. Other times, however, the companies that host the backend services of websites are to blame.
That's exactly what happened on June 8. Around 6:00 AM ET, it was quickly discovered that many websites across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and South Africa had become inaccessible. This included the likes of Amazon, Reddit, Twitch, Spotify, Hulu, PayPal, Shopify, CNN, The New York Times, Gov.uk, and others. For users that tried visiting these sites during the outage, they were met with a 503 error. A little over an hour later, things gradually returned to normal and all was well once again. At the heart of this particular outage was a company by the name of Fastly. Fastly offers cloud computing services to companies so they can host websites and apps on the internet, similar to something like Amazon Web Services or Cloudflare.
Why Fastly Went Down On June 8
Fastly initially acknowledged the outage at 5:58 AM ET. At that time, the company posted an error message saying, "We're currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services." Fast forward to 6:57 AM ET, and Fastly returned to report, "The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return."
For those that may not be familiar, CDN is short for 'content delivery network.' CDNs are networks of proxy servers and data centers, with the goal being to deliver easy availability and fast performance on websites when users visit them. They're a key component in making the internet work the way it does, and when a company's CDNs go down for whatever reason, that can result in a lot of trouble.
While the outage has since been resolved and things are back to normal, situations like this are a reminder why backend companies like Fastly are so important. They may not receive the same attention as sites like Facebook or Apple, but without them, the internet can't exist the way it does today.
Source: Fastly