Internet Outage? ☁️

So, you might have noticed recently for several hours that services like Amazon, Shopify, Twitch, Spotify, and many more of the popular internet services were offline and not accessible. It wasn’t just you, it was happening across the world. Fastly, a company that provides global CDN infrastructure and services to some of your favorite websites and internet services, experienced what they called a “glitch.”

Let’s first clarify something: this was not an “internet outage,” the internet was working just fine. The problem here is that a service provider (Fastly) to some of the world’s most popular internet services, experienced a problem that in turn made their services inaccessible to you and me and everyone else around the world.

CDN is short for “Content Delivery Network.” In simple terms, a CDN is a network of content servers all around the world in different geographic locations. They cache internet content so that every request you and I make to internet service is not necessarily served every time from the originating server. This makes delivery of content quicker especially when you also consider that such servers are spread across the world, closer to users. Of course, the first request a user makes for such static content is served directly from the origin server.

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