'Domino effect': Why the world's biggest websites suddenly went offline
The
hour-long Fastly Inc. outage was a reminder of how exposed the world’s biggest
websites are to the impact of disruptions ranging from simple human error to
coordinated cyberattack.
The
failure at Fastly, which helps websites load their pages faster, sent vast
swaths of the web offline on Tuesday. News websites including CNN, the New York
Times and Bloomberg News, services such as Amazon.com Inc., Shopify Inc. and
Stripe Inc., plus sites as large as Spotify and Reddit all went offline. U.K.
government digital services were also unavailable for a period.
Major
sites began reporting problems around 10:30 a.m. U.K. time on Tuesday,
according to Downdetector, which tracks service interruptions.
In a
summary of the events that unfolded, the company said a valid software
configuration change by one of its customers triggered a previously
undiscovered bug, introduced during a May 12 software deployment. Fastly
quickly identified an issue with its content delivery network and announced it
was rolling out a fix just 46 minutes after acknowledging a problem. Sites
began to spring back to life soon afterward. Read More
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