Internet CDN Firm Scrambles to Fix Worldwide Outage
Fastly, a US-based firm serving content delivery services and acting as a CDN network, suffered an outage on a part of its platform, which led to issues with websites and accessing the Internet in general in a number of locations across the world.
Fastly have already informed the public that they have pinned down the source of the issue and are working as fast as possible to implement a fix.
The CDN outage affected a number of big websites, including many major news and reporting sites. Among those affected were huge names such as CNN, The New York Times and UK's BBC. The service outage temporarily cut off access to the website of the British government as well. Most notable among commercial websites, Amazon was also momentarily affected as well.
The websites affected would usually return en Error 503 - Service Unavailable message when a user would attempt to load them.
Websites are coming back online as Fastly hurries to get its services back up and running normally. Even though most sites are now accessible, some still have loading time issues, but those are expected to go away soon as well.
As expected, Downdetector, the website that takes user reports for website downtime issues was on fire today, with over 20 thousand reports for issues with Reddit and another 2 thousand reports related to Amazon. Twitch, a streaming platform owned by Amazon, was affected as well, judging by the spike in user reports on Downdetector.
Fastly uses a technology known as "edge cloud" to speed up content delivery and loading times for websites it works with.
There is no information about any bad actor involvement in the outage. Fastly has described the issue as relating to "service configuration" and has not given any indication that there was foul play of any kind involved in the incident. This is reassuring, given the recent string of successful, extremely high-profile ransomware attacks that have taken place over the past couple of months.
Those attacks include targets such as Colonial Pipeline, a huge US liquid fuel provider, as well as the entire medical IT network of Ireland. In recent news, the US DoJ informed the public that it had successfully got back more than half of the ransom Colonial paid to threat actor DarkSide, in a highly unusual occurrence of bitcoin ransom recovery.
