One of the biggest CDN providers, Fastly, faced an outage. The outage, which lasted for around an hour, caused numerals of popular websites down.
Quoted from Tech Crunch, several sites affected by the outage are Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and Financial Times.
Soon after the outage, Fastly put out a statement to affirm that “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services”.
Fastly managed to resolve the issue roughly an hour after. At 4:02 AM PT, Tech Crunch reported that most of the affected websites and services have started to load normally. Fastly, though, didn’t specify the cause of the shortage as of yet.
More about Fastly, the content delivery networks (CDN) provider
Content delivery networks (CDNs) play an important role in the internet infrastructure. CDN companies provide servers to improve the performance and availability of web services. CDNs is the proxy servers. It caches some data as close to the end-user as possible.
Media content, for example, is frequently cached at a CDN server near you. This way, there is no need to retrieve from the source server every time a user accesses a web page.
Despite being called a digital platform, the web itself is still very physical by nature. Loading a page on a server takes hundreds of milliseconds to get the page. Without any improvements, it will take a longer time to load on a page. Caching a page will make it faster as CDN can start sending the content of the page in under 25 milliseconds.
Over times, CDNs came up with more features. Among them are load balancing, DDoS protection, web application firewalls and other features to assure securities. There are a lot of CDN companies, such as Fastly, Cloudflare, CloudFront on Amazon Web Services and Akamai.
Fastly is relatively popular among media websites. Quoted from Tech Crunch, shares for Fastly in day trading recorded a 5.21% fall to $48.06 compared to the previous day’s closing price.
Additionally, the issue faced today is not only related to the data centre in particular. Fastly calls this a “global CDN disruption”, which might also mean the issue is affecting the company’s network globally.
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