On Tuesday morning, a significant portion of the internet went down for 45 minutes in the UK, affecting major websites such as Reddit, Gov.uk, Hulu, the Guardian, and the White House. Users were met with blank white pages and error messages indicating the connection was unavailable.
The problem was traced to Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN) provider. Fastly acknowledged the issue on its status page within minutes, stating it was experiencing disruptions globally. The company later attributed the outage to a “service configuration” that triggered failures across its points of presence (POPs) and said it had disabled that configuration.
CDNs like Fastly improve website speed and reliability by hosting copies of clients' sites on servers around the world. This reduces the physical distance data must travel and helps handle traffic spikes. However, when a CDN fails, all sites relying on it can go offline simultaneously.
Fastly’s outage appears to have been caused by a configuration error, leading to a cascading failure. While the exact details remain unclear, it is unlikely to have been a malicious attack. The incident highlights the concentration of internet infrastructure among a few providers, such as Fastly, Cloudflare, and Amazon's CloudFront.
Although some sites, like the BBC, had backup systems in place and remained operational, most affected services had to wait for Fastly to restore service. Running multiple providers as a backup is technically complex and expensive, and may not prevent short-term outages, as seen with Gov.uk, which required manual intervention to switch.
