Fastly CDN Outage Takes Down Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit & More

Widespread Internet Outage Impacts Major Websites

A significant number of highly-visited websites, including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC, and the Financial Times, are presently experiencing service disruptions.

Initial reports suggest a failure within Fastly, a prominent content delivery network (CDN) provider, as indicated by a product manager at the Financial Times. Fastly has officially acknowledged the outage via its system status page.

Fastly’s Initial Response

The company stated, “We are currently investigating potential impacts to performance with our CDN services.”

Service Restoration Begins

Update at 3:50 AM PT: Partial restoration of service is underway, with some websites gradually returning to normal operation. Fastly reported, “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” on its status page.

Outage Resolved

Update at 4:02 AM PT: Affected websites and services are now functioning as expected, indicating the issue has been resolved. However, the root cause of the disruption has not yet been publicly disclosed by the company. The total duration of the outage was approximately one hour.

Fastly’s Detailed Explanation

Update at 2:43 AM PT, Wednesday: Fastly provided a detailed account of the incident. According to Nick Rockwell, SVP of Engineering and Infrastructure, “We experienced a global outage resulting from an undiscovered software flaw that was activated on June 8th by a legitimate customer configuration alteration.”

“Within one minute, we detected the disruption, then pinpointed and isolated the cause, and deactivated the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating normally.”

Understanding Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Content delivery networks are a fundamental component of modern internet infrastructure. These networks consist of globally distributed servers designed to enhance the performance and reliability of online services.

CDNs function as intermediary servers, caching data in locations geographically closer to end-users. For example, video content is frequently cached on a CDN server near a user’s location, reducing the need to retrieve it from the original server each time a webpage is loaded.

The Physicality of the Digital World

Despite being a digital realm, the internet relies on physical infrastructure. Loading a page from a server located across the globe can introduce significant latency, measured in hundreds of milliseconds.

This accumulated latency can result in a noticeably slow user experience. When a page is cached by a CDN, content delivery can often begin in under 25 milliseconds.

Expanding CDN Capabilities

Over time, CDNs have expanded their functionalities to include load balancing, protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, web application firewalls, and other security measures.

Leading CDN providers include Fastly, Cloudflare, CloudFront (Amazon Web Services), and Akamai.

Fastly’s Market Position

Fastly is particularly favored by media organizations. The company became publicly traded in 2019. Currently, Fastly shares (NYSE:FSLY) are valued at $48.06, representing a 5.21% decrease from the previous day’s closing price.

A Global Disruption

This particular incident is not confined to a single data center. Fastly has characterized it as a “global CDN disruption,” indicating a widespread impact across its entire network.