If you’ve heard of it, its website likely went down this week.
Around 6 a.m. (EST) on Tuesday, Fastly, a cloud-based content delivery network, experienced an outage that brought many of the world’s biggest websites down for just under an hour.
The United Kingdom, Amazon, Spotify, eBay, The New York Times, BBC, CNN, Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitch all watched as their websites simply stopped working. Others who host only aspects of their websites with Fastly saw some minor failures as well. Twitter users, for example, could access the website but not see emojis.
A bug in a recent software deployment meant that downtime was inevitable. When an unnamed Fastly customer changed their account’s settings, they unknowingly activated a dormant bug that caused 85 percent of Fastly’s network to fail. Fastly immediately identified the problem, and in less than an hour, 95 percent of their network was operating again.
It’s unclear how many websites went down Tuesday, but as one of the largest edge cloud platforms in the world, the possible impact is nearly unimaginable. A Fastly blog published Tuesday, said, “This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.”
Despite the quick fix, the danger and loss of revenue highlight the importance of disaster recovery plans and backup support. Ensure your team’s functions are always protected by contacting us today.
