The internet is down
For a few hours on Tuesday morning, huge swathes of the internet went down.
Data from DownDetector.com, a tool that tracks outages and reports of problems at major websites, details how problems reported at huge internet properties such as Amazon, Spotify, PayPal and many others suddenly exploded in volume.
Not so Fastly
You probably recognize most of the companies in the chart above, with the exception of the last one. Fastly is the reason everything went wrong. Fastly is a cloud computing company, which maintains servers that let websites load content quickly — and it turns out a lot of websites use them.
One of the industries hit hardest were news sites, including CNN, The New York Times, The Financial Times and many others. Some resorted to live tweeting their news reports, but our favourite impromptu solution has to go to tech website The Verge which fired up a public Google Doc to start publishing their news stories. That kind of worked, but they forgot to turn public editing off so — for a brief period — anyone could edit the document, which obviously was chaos.
Fastly has come out and said "our bad", and so far it appears that the error was not the cause of a cyberattack. Intentional or not, the outage was a timely reminder of how fragile — and interdependent — the tech ecosystem can be.
