Internet securityBroad Swath of the Web Knocked Offline by Outage

Published 8 June 2021

A broad swath of the World Wide Web has been knocked offline by an outage at edge cloud CDN specialist Fastly. The company runs an “edge cloud,” which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic. The technology requires Fastly to sit between most of its clients and their users. That means that if the service suffers a catastrophic failure, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all.

A broad swath of the World Wide Web — including major news sites (Financial Times, Guardian, The Verge, CNN, New York Times, and many more), social networks (Reddit, Twitter, GitHub, and many more), streaming services (Twitch, Hulu, and others), developer sites (Stackoverflow), crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, Amazon, webcomic xkcd, the U.K. government’s primary website, and many more — has been knocked offline by an outage at edge cloud CDN specialist Fastly.

The company runs an “edge cloud,” which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic.

The technology requires Fastly to sit between most of its clients and their users. That means that if the service suffers a catastrophic failure, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all.

The Guardian reports that mid-morning U.K. time Tuesday, more and more sites began to report that users could not access the sites. These users were welcomed by a 503 cache errors or connection failure messages.

Security expert Mikko Hypponen told The Register that the culprit as Fastly, an edge-centric cloud computing specialist founded in 2011 by former Wikia chief technical officer Artur Bergman.

Fastly edge platform is having problems, which means a big part of the internet is having problems. This includes Twitter. Even fastly.com itself is unavailable in many locations,” Hypponen wrote of the outage. “Basically, internet is down.”

Fastly has about 1,000 employees and an annual revenue of $200 million. It is responsible for optimizing websites – primarily through its content delivery network (CDN), which appears to have been to root cause of Tuesday’s outage.

Fastly’s status page confirmed “potential impact to performance with our CDN service” starting at 09:58 UTC.

A Fastly spokesperson said: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs [points of presence] globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online.”

A spokesperson for Fastly confirmed to The Register that the company is “aware of the issue and can confirm it’s global,” and that “all hands are on deck and working hard to resolve.”

The Guardian notes that the increasing centralization of internet infrastructure in the hands of a few large companies means that single points of failure can result in sweeping outages. In 2017, a problem at Amazon’s AWS hosting business, for instance, took out some of the world’s biggest websites for several hours across the entire US east coast.

And in 2020, a problem with Cloudflare, another CDN company, led to a half-hour outage for most of the internet in major cities across Europe and the Americas. The Cloudflare outage was eventually traced back to an error in a single physical link, connecting data centers in Newark and Chicago, which caused a cascading failure that knocked out almost 20 data centers worldwide.