Recently, this week on 8th June the most popular websites faced a disruption when a Fastly CDN servers crashed due to some undiscovered bug triggered by the specific customer by specific circumstances.
In this massive outage, big media websites like The New York Times, Financial Times, Vox Media, etc and other big companies’ websites like GitHub, Twitch, Reddit, etc all together suffered the issue.
The disruptions due to that extent to a large portion of the internet because few companies provide infrastructure like Fastly. In 2017, a single coding error resulted in the same outage for huge cyberspace at Amazon Web Services.
After that Incident cloud service provider Fastly referred to the global outage of the internet because of its content delivery network or CDN.
The affected websites began to slowly recover to a working state on that after few hours. The disruption affected not only the front end also the backend, leaving a Status code 502.
Now we’ll look into the timelines of the incident on that day which is released by the Fastly official
(all times are in UTC):
09:47 Initial onset of global disruption
09:48 Global disruption identified by Fastly monitoring
09:58 Status post is published
10:27 Fastly Engineering identified the customer configuration
10:36 Impacted services began to recover
11:00 Majority of services recovered
12:35 Incident mitigated
12:44 Status post resolved
17:25 Bug fix deployment began
Now, those who are wondering why the massive internet outage happened, need to understand how Fastly works then you need to know how Content Delivery Network or CDN works. It’s worth investing some time knowing how CDN plays in the Internet ecosystem.
Contents of a website(video, songs, movie, blog, etc.) which we request from maybe are hosted remotely ( probably thousands of thousand miles away) on the cloud and there must be a way to get it quickly and efficiently. That’s the time where CDN slides in. So, CDNs are sitting between the internet and your browsing system. They act as an edge server from where you get your requested content efficiently and quickly.
Content Delivery Network
Now in the case of Fastly the CDNs are got affected by the un-intentional bug which was pushed by a particular customer resulted in the global outage of the internet.
