PARIS: Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were coming back online on Tuesday after getting hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly Inc. High-traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times went down, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. They came back after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour early in the morning in the United States but middle of the day in Europe.
"Our global network is coming back online," Fastly said. One of the world's most widely-used cloud-based content delivery network providers, the company earlier reported a disruption from a "service configuration" and did not explain.
"Incidents like this underline the fragility of the internet and its dependence on a patchwork of fragmented technology. Ironically, this also underlines its inherent strength and how quickly it can recover," Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, said.
"The fact that an outage like this can grab headlines around the world shows how rare it is."
Typical service configurations for a cloud service provider can include updating security rules to protect information, or instructing a server to refresh the contents of a news site before serving it to a customer, said Andy Champagne, senior vice president at Akamai, a cloud service company.
A simple typo can be propagated to thousands of servers and cause disruptions, he said.
Fastly, which went public in 2019 and has a market capitalization of under $6 billion, is far smaller than peers like Amazon's AWS. The company's content delivery network (CDN) helps websites move content using less-congested routes, enabling them to reach consumers faster.
"In the grand scheme of things, we actually think that this is a little bit of a positive for other CDNs and also just shows how difficult managing a CDN can be," said James Fish, analyst at Piper Sandler & Co. Apart from Fastly, the other main CDN providers include Akamai Technologies, Cloudera and AWS.
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