What caused the internet outage that brought down Amazon, Reddit and Gov.uk?
For 45 minutes in the UK morning, a significant chunk of the web did not work. People trying to visit a huge array of websites, from the Guardian through Gov.uk to Reddit, Hulu and the White House, received a blank white page and an error message telling them the connection was unavailable.
The errors were focused on large websites with substantial traffic, but weren’t universal: users in some places, such as Berlin, Germany, reported no problems throughout the outage.
The cause of the outage was quickly identified as a problem with the “edge cloud” provider Fastly. Within a few minutes, the company admitted on a status page that it was experiencing problems. With the exception of a few providers, including the BBC, which had backup systems in place, every affected website had to wait for Fastly to fix the error before they could restore service.
The company offers a content delivery network service, or CDN. When it works, a CDN is supposed to improve the speed and reliability of the internet. Rather than visitors to a website all having to connect to servers run by that company – which might not even be in the same country they are – they instead contact Fastly, which runs huge server farms all around the world that host copies of their clients’ websites.
