A major internet outage has taken countless major websites offline simultaneously. The outage has forced Reddit, Twitch, PayPal, eBay, Stack Overflow, HBO Max, Vimeo, Shopify, Spotify, GitHub, and numerous other massive services offline, along with government, news, and business sites.
Fastly CDN Outage Takes Internet Offline
The outage appears to have stemmed from an issue at the popular CDN, Fastly, which many of the largest internet sites and services use for content delivery. As one of the largest CDN providers, issues affecting Fastly have a massively disruptive effect, knocking the world’s biggest services offline.
The Fastly Service Status page provided a short update confirming the issue, although it didn’t acknowledge what the issue is.
Update at 10:44 UTC : The Fastly team has identified the issue and “a fix is being implemented.” Normal service should resume shortly, although users may “experience increased origin load as global services return.”
Update at 10:57 UTC: All systems are go, and affected services should now resume regular operation.
Frustratingly, the “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services” message doesn’t provide any insight into when service will return to normal. Currently, any website affected by the Fastly outage is displaying a 503 error message, meaning there is no connection to the server.
Something big is borked. pic.twitter.com/Q2kTCO4lFp
— Gavin Phillips (@GavinSpavin) June 8, 2021
Why Did the Fastly Outage Take Internet Offline?
Content Delivery Network’s (CDNs) are part of the backbone of the internet. Every website uses a CDN of some type, helping to cache useful and frequently accessed content in servers closer to your location.
When you click a link, the CDN delivers the content as fast as possible. The closer the server to your physical location, the faster the content will arrive (typically). A major CDN, such as Fastly, has servers spread around the world, helping some of the world’s largest services provide easily accessible content at all times.
The world’s largest websites use CDNs with massive capabilities, such as integrated DDoS Protection, load balancing, and more. However, when one of these massive CDNs experiences an issue, as Fastly has, it can have a significant knock-on effect, taking down any website or service using the CDN to deliver content to users.
As you can see below, the result is degraded server performance, affecting every world region.
When Will the Internet Come Back Online?
While the entire internet wasn’t swatted offline by the Fastly CDN outage, many major services were. Notably, Twitter remained online (although somewhat amusingly, its emoji network went offline), as did MakeUseOf.
As of 10:57 UTC, on June 8, 2021, the Fastly CDN is officially fixed, although it may take some time for regular internet load to rebalance. At the time of writing, Fastly hasn’t given an indicator as to what caused the outage. All in all, the Fastly outage last for around one hour.