What exactly happened?
Between 3 pm and 4 pm IST, these websites suddenly went offline and weren’t accessible across the globe. Users saw messages like “Error 503 Service Unavailable” and “Connection error”. Downdetector, which provides real-time information on internet outages, confirmed it.
As per a CNBC report, the entire outage has been attributed to Fastly, a Content Delivery Network or CDN, that backs up all the operations of the websites that went offline. There was some problem with its services due to a self-configuration that took down these sites.
What is a CDN?
A CDN is a group of servers distributed across certain geography, which work in unison to provide fast delivery of content on the internet. They allow for fast transfer of assets such as HTML pages, Javascript files, images, videos that are necessary to load content on the internet.
What is Fastly?
Fastly is a US-based cloud computing services provider. It provides services for CDNs and was the main reason behind the outage. It claimed responsibility of the entire disruption of the internet services.
We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online. Continued status is available at https://t.co/RIQWX0LWwl
— Fastly (@fastly) June 8, 2021
“We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change. We detected the disruption within one minute, then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal,” Fastly’s SVP of Engineering and Infrastructure, Nick Rockwell wrote in a blog post.
He also gave a timeline of events that transpired.
On May 12, we began a software deployment that introduced a bug that could be triggered by a specific customer configuration under specific circumstances.
Early June 8, a customer pushed a valid configuration change that included the specific circumstances that triggered the bug, which caused 85% of our network to return errors. Once the immediate effects were mitigated, we turned our attention to fixing the bug and communicating with our customers. We created a permanent fix for the bug and began deploying it at 17:25 UTC,” wrote Rockwell.
