Glitch Unmasks Role of Networks Making Websites Faster

The use of remote networks to make websites run faster can also leave the sites vulnerable to outages, such as the one that derailed online services for dozens of businesses and government agencies around the world early Tuesday, industry analysts said.

For about an hour, customer-facing websites for the U.K. government, several major U.S. and European news outlets and other businesses were thrown offline.

The culprit was a glitch at a content delivery network service, a behind-the-scenes cloud-based system used by websites to open data-heavy web pages faster, run videos or stream games for customers without interruptions. The systems are also referred to as edge cloud networks.

Content delivery networks are critical linchpins in how the internet works, said Glenn O’Donnell, vice president and research director at information-technology research firm Forrester Research Inc. “When one of them suffers a mistake like this, things go very, very badly,” he said.

The system that caused Tuesday’s blackout, operated by Fastly Inc., encountered a configuration error, a company spokesperson said. Joshua Bixby, Fastly’s chief executive, said the outage wasn’t related to a cyberattack.

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