A massive cloud service outage briefly took down dozens of major news and commerce sites Tuesday morning, The Associated Press reports.
Dozens of news sites like The New York Times and CNN, certain Amazon websites, and social networks like Reddit were all inaccessible early Tuesday. The outage also took down the United Kingdom’s government page. Some news outlets in Asia were also affected.
The outage caused a stock market dip on the heels of cyberattacks that impacted Colonial Pipeline and the meat giant JBS, though Tuesday’s outage is not believed to be related to a cyberattack.
Cloud service snafu:
The San Francisco-based cloud service company Fastly said its was behind the outage at around 6 am Eastern and that it was "continuing to investigate the issue."
An hour later, the company said that “the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied,” though it warned that “Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return."
Fastly said that a service configuration was responsible for the outage.
"Looks like it is slowly coming back," Doug Madory, an internet infrastructure expert at Kentik, told the AP. "it is serious because Fastly is one of the world's biggest CDNs and this was a global outage."
Fastly a key IT infrastructure firm:
The episode highlights how critical a small number of companies have become in keeping the internet online.
Fastly provides fast web servers that cache or store content like images and video so they don’t need to be fetched from the original server in order to make them accessible more quickly around the world.
Some earlier unrelated major internet outages were caused by problems at Amazon’s AWS cloud services.
"Even the biggest and most sophisticated companies experience outages. But they can also recover fairly quickly," Madory said.
