How an Obscure Company Took Down Big Chunks of the Internet 

Early Tuesday morning, large portions of the web sputtered out for about an hour. The downed sites shared no obvious theme or geography; the outages were global, and they hit everything from Reddit to Spotify to The New York Times. (And yes, also WIRED.) In fact, the only thing they have in common is Fastly, a content-delivery network (CDN) provider whose predawn hiccup reverberated across the internet.

You may not have heard of Fastly, but you likely interact with it in some fashion every time you go online. Along with Cloudflare and Akamai, it’s one of the biggest CDN providers in the world. And while Fastly has been vague about what specific glitch caused Tuesday’s worldwide disruptions, the incident offers a stark reminder of how fragile and interconnected internet infrastructure can be, especially when so much of it hinges on a handful of companies that operate largely outside of public awareness.

To understand how a Fastly problem can quickly become everyone’s problem, it’s worth spending a minute on the role CDNs play in the internet ecosystem. While it’s tempting to think of the internet as amorphous—they even call it “the cloud”—the articles you read, the movies and songs you stream, the photos you post, they all live on physical servers. And while that content might be primarily hosted on a cloud provider, you still need a way to get it to people quickly and efficiently. 

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