A massive internet-wide outage struck the web on Tuesday. Several major websites were impacted by the outage that originated at Fastly, a key content delivery network that supports many major companies and sites online.
Websites affected included huge internet cornerstones like Reddit, Twitch, Amazon, PayPal, Spotify and CNN amongst many others. Many websites weren’t taken off the internet completely but were affected in other ways.
PayPal users complained that payments weren’t being processed, Twitter users were unable to post certain emojis.
The outage lasted about an hour. Users navigating to affected websites would be met with a familiar error message: “Error 503 Service Unavailable.” Fastly quickly identified the issue and immediately set to work on a fix.
What Caused the Outage
Fastly has summarised the service interruption in a post in an official blog. According to the company, a customer pushed a valid configuration change probably within a website or internet service. This configuration change triggered a previously undiscovered bug. This bug caused 85% of Fastly’s network to collapse.
A high-level website and application hosting service, many large international corporations use Fastly to host their content for millions of users worldwide.
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