Major websites down due to Fastly config error

Garima Kejriwal

June 11, 2021

Thousands of websites, including government portals, news, and social media sites, stopped responding on Tuesday, June 8, 2021, after a massive outage. Other high-traffic sites included Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network, and the New York Times also went down owing to the error. They were all victims of an internal glitch at a primary US cloud-service provider, Fastly Inc. Fastly Inc. is the operator of a content delivery network service used to speed up loading time for websites and protect them from DDoS attacks and keeps the high traffic in check. It mainly stores content from websites on many servers closer to end-users, reducing the time it takes information to reach them. That speeds up things like website loading and streaming. In a statement, Fastly Inc. said: "We identified a service configuration that triggered disruption across our POPs (points of presence) globally and have disabled that configuration." However, this problem seemed to be localised, affecting only specific locations of the US and Europe. This disruption has led some to question the wisdom of having so much internet infrastructure in the hands of a few companies. It is also the latest example of how a problem at a single player in the internet's piping can have outsize repercussions.

Abridged fromSky News