What is Fastly and why did it just break Amazon, Reddit and much of the internet?
Fastly #Fastly
Well, the internet was nice while it lasted, folks. On Tuesday morning, many of the websites we rely on daily, including Amazon, Reddit, Pinterest and, unfortunately, CNET went offline due to a major outage at a service called Fastly.
At around 3.58 a.m. PT/6.58 a.m. ET, Fastly noted an error on its status update page that said: “we’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.” Shortly thereafter, reports of major news publications including the BBC, CNN and the New York Time being offline emerged on Twitter. Twitter itself was still running, although the server that hosted its emojis went down, leading to some odd-looking tweets.
Well, the internet was good while it lasted.
Rather than isolated incidents affecting individual sites, it soon transpired a mass outage had taken place that had brought much of the internet to its knees. Across the world, people were receiving Error: 503 messages as they tried to access sites, including some vital services, such as the UK’s government’s gov.uk web properties.
Almost an hour later, at 4.44 a.m. PT/7.44 a.m. ET, Fastly updated its status page again to say the issue has been identified and a fix was being implemented. The company did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Fastly is a cloud computing service provider that has been around since 2011. In 2017, it launched an edge cloud platform designed to bring websites closer to the people who use them. Effectively this means that if you’re accessing a website hosted in another country, it will store some of that website closer to you so that there’s no need to go fetch all of that website’s content from far away every time you need it.
This makes for faster website load times, and optimizes images, videos and other high payload content to show up quickly and smoothly when you land on a web page. It also performs vital cybersecurity functions, protecting sites from DDoS attacks and bots, as well as providing a web application firewall.
Fastly is a widely used service by web publishers and services — and it became apparent exactly how widely used on Tuesday when vast swaths of the internet was unavailable. Due to the way Fastly sits between the back-end web servers and the front-facing internet as we see it, any errors on its part can cause whole websites to be unavailable.
This story is developing, please check back for updates…