Earlier today (8th June), websites across the globe experienced a major outage. Cloud computing provider Fastly, which underpins a lot of major websites, said it was behind the problems.
Among the websites affected were the UK government website – gov.uk – Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Times.
El País reported earlier, the problem “affected numerous Spanish media, including the websites of AS, SER and Cinco Días.”
Sites now back online
Fastly said there were issues with its global content delivery network (CDN) and was implementing a fix.
In a statement, it said: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruption across our POPs (points of presence) globally and have disabled that configuration.
“Our global network is coming back online.”
Issues with infrastructure controlled by so few
The issues began at around noon Spanish time, with the major outage lasting for an hour.
Fastly runs an “edge cloud”, designed to speed up loading times for websites, as well as protect them from denial-of-service attacks.
The problems appeared to be localised. In other words, only specific locations across Europe and the US were affected.
Some question the wisdom of having few companies control so much internet infrastructure. When something goes wrong, it causes mass disruption.
Jake Moore, a cyber-specialist at security firm ESET was quoted on the BBC as saying: “This highlights the importance and significance of these vast hosting companies and what they represent.”
