If you were having difficulty accessing your favorite website on Tuesday evening Australian time, you’re not alone. A jaw-dropping number of major websites around the globe suddenly became unavailable with no immediately …
June 9,2021 If you were having difficulty accessing your favorite website on Tuesday evening Australian time, you’re not alone. A jaw-dropping number of major websites around the globe suddenly became unavailable with no immediately obvious explanation—before reappearing an hour later. It’s disconcerting when the sites we rely on suddenly become inaccessible, and even more so when it happens on such a vast scale. This outage saw seemingly unrelated sites go dark, including the BBC, Pinterest, the Financial Times, Reddit and even The Conversation. How can so many sites, from so many different organizations, all be affected by the same incident? To understand the answer, you need to know what a CDN ( content delivery network) is and how crucial they are to the smooth running of the internet. What happened and what’s a CDN? While it’s too early to provide a comprehensive diagnosis of the incident, the internet (once it was accessible again) quickly pointed to the culprit: Fastly. Fastly is a cloud computing company that provides CDN services to a range of websites including Amazon and Deliveroo. But how can a single company bring down a noticeable proportion of the internet? When we access a website, we might assume our browser goes off to the internet, talks to the remote site, and then presents the page on our screen. While this is in essence what happens, it masks a much more complicated process, which can include CDN services.
