CDN Glitch Leads to Massive Internet Outages

A glitch at Fastly, a popular CDN, led to outages for some of the internet’s biggest sites Tuesday morning.

CDNs, or content delivery networks, are distributed networks of servers designed to help websites and web apps manage their user load and remain responsive. Fastly is a popular CDN option that helps power some of the biggest websites on the net.

Early Tuesday, a glitch at Fastly led to outages at the BBC, CNN, Financial Times, The New York Times, Reddit, Spotify, GitHub, Twitch, Stack Overflow, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Shopify, Stripe and Vimeo.

Fastly confirmed the issue, and was able to quickly resolve it, although the outage illustrates the challenges associated with so many websites relying on a single point of potential failure.

“Today’s outage of major websites once again highlights the importance of access to online news and government services, underlining the importance of the internet for day to day living,” Matthew McDermott, Senior Officer, Access Partnership, a global tech policy consultancy, told WebPronews. “Fastly responded quickly to restored the issue but this serves as a reminder that resilience is an important part of digital infrastructure to modern life. Organisations and government bodies need to look at implementing the steps that look to assess, stabilize, improve and monitor to ensure this issue do not pose further problems in the future. Assessment is needed to determine the server’s bottleneck then stabilizing the issue with implementation of quick fixes will mitigate impact to broader stakeholders and users. After this, stakeholders will need to improve by augmenting and optimize server capabilities to ensure it meets the necessary needs. Lastly, regular monitoring will need to be set up using automated tools to help prevent future issues.”