Fastly fixes CDN glitch that caused a global internet outage

Bengaluru: Several prominent websites, including Amazon, Reddit and Spotify, experienced a brief but global outage due to glitches in cloud services provider Fastly’s content delivery network (CDN).

Websites of several international news websites, including Financial Times, The New York Times, CNN, The Guardian and Bloomberg, also faced hour-long downtimes, according to data from real-time internet outage tracker Downdetector. “Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service,” Downdetector said on its website.

At around 3:28 pm IST, Fastly on its website said it was investigating a potential impact to the performance of its CDN service. Almost exactly an hour later, the company said it had identified the issue and applied a fix for it. “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” Fastly said. On Twitter, the company said that a service configuration had triggered the disruptions, and had been disabled.



A number of the websites affected by the glitch were coming back online, but reports of sporadic internet outage persisted, an examination of Twitter posts indicated. The microblogging platform itself wasn’t affected by the glitch.

Content delivery networks, or CDNs, are used by companies that run global networks of servers. CDNs help improve performance by caching data as close to the end user as possible, so that web pages load quicker as the data doesn’t need to be fetched from the original server.

Fastly reported on its website that the incident affected over 80 service locations across the Asia-Pacific, North America, South America, South Africa, India and Europe. The list continued to be updated at the time of writing this story.