Failure at Fastly, which helps websites load their pages faster, sent vast swaths of the web offline on Tuesday.
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 a simple human error to coordinated cyberattacks.
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.
“This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them,” Nick Rockwell, Fastly’s senior vice president of engineering and infrastructure, said in the blog post.
Nevertheless, the cascade of failures across the web turned a mere “service configuration” into a global outage that hit large companies and small users alike.
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