Why the Internet Is Vulnerable to Outages

A wave of brief internet outages hit the websites and apps of dozens of financial institutions, airlines, and other companies during the week of June 14. Experts say it highlights the web’s vulnerability to shutdowns, and its growing reliance on a chain of servers called Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), which are responsible for the outages. 

CDNs have become increasingly popular in recent years, Olaf Kolkman, a principal at the Internet Society, a nonprofit that advocates for an open internet, said in an email interview.

"But the big drawback is that if something goes wrong in a CDN central configuration system, or there is a cybersecurity issue, then a lot of content goes down," Kolkman added. 

Most of the websites affected by the internet outage are served by the company Fastly, which is among the world’s biggest CDN providers. Another CDN, Akamai, said about 500 of its customers were affected after a software bug. 

"Many of the approximately 500 customers using this service were automatically rerouted, which restored operations within a few minutes," the company said in a statement on its website. "The large majority of the remaining customers manually rerouted shortly thereafter." 

Leave a Comment