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Fastly CDN problem caused wide website outages worldwide [u]

Fastly is a major content delivery network for the internet

Last updated

Global internet content delivery network Fastly was partially down for a period of time on Tuesday morning, making some users unable to access countless major websites, including Amazon.

Internet sites and services using the Fastly Content Delivery Network (CDN) were mostly unavailable for over an hour. Users across the world were unable to access sites, or were presented with unintended versions of those sites, such as Google Docs listings.

During the outage, if users could Twitter at all, they were seeing increasing reports of sites being down or presented in unreadable forms.

The issue varied enormously, depending on where users were in the world, and which of Fastly's servers is nearest. Many users had no access to Fastly-assisted sites at all, while for others there are only a few selected sites that are unavailable.

A "Global CDN Disruption" notice on Fastly's support Service Status page said that the issue "has been identified and a fix is being implemented."

"Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return," it added.

Updated: 07:17 with news that Fastly says a fix has been applied.

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3 Comments

lkrupp 19 Years · 10521 comments

This is a real first world problem. With the recent ransomware attacks it has become clear how easily we can be taken down without a shot fired. Just look what happens in these forums when a glitch in some Apple service takes things down. People here start running around with their hair on fire about how their ‘workflow’ has been disrupted, how they are dead in the water, and how incompetent Apple is.

Two nights ago we had a one hour power outage in our neighborhood (tree limb fell on a line). It was like an ant hill on fire with people out in the street, police cars driving around, waiting for the power company to fix it. Luckily the cellphone network was up so one could tether their computer to their phone.

Imagine the chaos if a bad actor nation decided to take everything down at once. If they can take pipelines and hospitals down then what’s the limit? Is the United States’ data network really that vulnerable?

Wgkrueger 8 Years · 352 comments

lkrupp said:
This is a real first world problem. With the recent ransomware attacks it has become clear how easily we can be taken down without a shot fired. Just look what happens in these forums when a glitch in some Apple service takes things down. People here start running around with their hair on fire about how their ‘workflow’ has been disrupted, how they are dead in the water, and how incompetent Apple is.

Two nights ago we had a one hour power outage in our neighborhood (tree limb fell on a line). It was like an ant hill on fire with people out in the street, police cars driving around, waiting for the power company to fix it. Luckily the cellphone network was up so one could tether their computer to their phone.

Imagine the chaos if a bad actor nation decided to take everything down at once. If they can take pipelines and hospitals down then what’s the limit? Is the United States’ data network really that vulnerable?

Apparently here in Texas all we need is a snowstorm. 

larryjw 9 Years · 1036 comments

Where's the system redundancy? It doesn't seem to take much to take down large swathes of critical infrastructure -- or what we deem to be critical infrastructure.