CDN

Fastly a major CDN provider goes down

          Numerous websites were unavailable on Tuesday after an apparent widespread at cloud service company Fastly. Dozens of websites went down briefly around the globe Tuesday, including CNN, The New York Times some Amazon pages, the Financial Times, Reddit,...San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 10.00 a.m. UTC. About an hour later, the company said: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied.” Most of the sites soon appeared to be back online.

What is Fastly?

                            Fastly is a content-delivery network, or CDN. It provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web’s popular sites. These servers store content such as images and video in places around the world so that it is closer to users, allowing them to fetch it more quickly and smoothly.

What is a CDN?

                            CDNs automatically store updates and pre-save them in the servers. Therefore, wherever a visitor may be, the content he or she consumes from a website is transmitted via the user’s edge server—the server closest to their location

The Aftermath

                            Internet traffic measurement showed that Fastly began to recover from the outage roughly an hour after incident happened. The incident is considered serious because Fastly is one of the world’s biggest CDNs and the outage was not on a local scale. Internet service outages are not uncommon and are only rarely the result of hacking or other mischief.


The incident highlighted the fragility of the internet’s architecture given its heavy reliance on Big Tech companies (such as Amazon’s AWS cloud services) as opposed to a more distributed array of companies.



That being said even the biggest and most sophisticated companies are not exempt from outages. But they can also recover fairly quickly.


When the outage hit, users trying to access the CNN or The Financial Times website got a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.”

Attempts to reach The New York Times and U.K. government’s gov.uk site returned an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message.

 The issue was later resolved (approximately one hour after the occurence) and all related sites went back to functioning normally