Worldwide internet outage caused by CDN glitch now fixed by Fastly

It was a day of chaos for all the leading websites globally due to a glitch on Fastly’s CDN, which caused a major internet outage for the leading websites globally. For a short period, a major downtime was reported in their global networks, however after being acted upon the issue seems to have been resolved now. Leading news organizations and top websites around the world including CNN to Bloomberg, Amazon Twitch, Spotify, Amazon, Financial Times, New York Times, The Guardian etc. faced a massive downtime for almost an hour before being back up.

Almost exactly an hour later, Fastly commented on its website and twitter about the issue with a fix “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” Fastly said. On Twitter, the company said that a service configuration had triggered the disruptions, and had been disabled it was around 2pm GST on 8th July 2021.

Fastly is an American cloud computing services provider, founded in 2011 by Artur Bergman. It describes its network as an edge cloud platform, which is designed to help developers extend their core cloud infrastructure to the edge of the network, closer to users. The Fastly edge cloud platform includes their content delivery network (CDN), image optimization, video and streaming, cloud security, and load balancing services.

CDN’s (Content delivery networks) are critical parts of the internet’s infrastructure, as they run a global network of servers. CDN’s essentially work by fetching content for users in caches closer to the internet user, rather than pulling up data from the original server. Fastly serves as one of the top platforms and application hosting provider that many large enterprises use to serve content to millions of users simultaneously.

Rather than hosting all website content on a single set of servers in one location, Fastly puts cloud infrastructure in dozens of locations to let people download from a server closest to them. These servers are meant to improve the performance of web services, meaning users get their internet searches faster and more efficiently. Fastly edge cloud platform includes their content delivery network, image optimization, video and streaming, cloud security, and load balancing services

The goal of a CDN like Fastly is to reduce latency between the time the internet user searches for something and the time that search appears. Higher latency or higher delay means a lesser user experience. Fastly earlier reported on its website that the incident affected over 80 service locations across the Asia-Pacific, North America, South America, South Africa, India and Europe. The list continued to be updated at the time of writing this story.

Currently “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied.