Fastly CDN outage brings down leading video servics
Details
Editor
| 08 June 2021
What was initially reported as an issue with the potential impact to performance at content delivery network (CDN) provider Fastly quickly escalated into major service outage for major media firms.
nokia networks core networks 30Dec2019
While the precise nature of the issue has yet to be revealed, Fastly has confirmed that it first experienced issues at 10:58 British Summer Time when it said that it was investigating what it regarded as a potential impact to performance with its CDN services. The company began investigating the incident which caused the lack of access to client’s web site until 11:36 when it said that issue has been identified and a fix was being implemented. The fix was officially applied at 11:57 at which time Fastly warned that customers may experience increased origin load and lower cache hit ratio (CHR) as global services return.

The outage affected Fastly clients around the globe such as Amazon, Twitch, Hulu, HBO Max, Vimeo, A&E and CNN. Territories includedcAustralia, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Singapore, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, the UK, Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Spain, Norway, Italy, Sweden, the US, Canada, France, Austria, South Africa and India.

Since12:00 UK time Fastly's sole official reply has been a statement distributed across its social media platform, saying: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online.”

Other voices within the network industry were more forthcoming. Toby Stephenson, CTO at IT and cyber security expert Neuways said the incident highlighted the reliance of many of the world’s biggest websites on CDNs such as Fastly. “As there are so few of these CDN services, these outages can occur from time-to-time,” he remarked. “By using these CDNs to push content to readers, these websites are usually fast and responsive, but on this occasion they have been left with egg on their collective faces. The technical backends of these big websites are probably fine, but it is the frontends that can’t be accessed and content cannot be pushed as the network is down."

Gaz Jones, technical director of digital agency, Think3 added: “This is what happens when half of the internet relies on Goliaths like Amazon, Google and Fastly for all of its servers and web services. The entire internet has become dangerously geared on just a few players."