An internet failure that has affected some of the world’s main websites has generated a huge global alert and has once again highlighted the vulnerability of digital connections and the weakness of the system on which the network is based. All of these happening at a time when companies and users are more dependent than ever on them due to teleworking.
At around 11:00:00 UTC a failure of the company Fastly, a content distribution network (CDN), which provides its services to multiple websites, caused sites such as Amazon, EL PAÍS, The New York Times, Twitch, Financial Times and Reddit to suffer problems and in some cases remained inaccessible to their users. Some 50 minutes later, the company announced that the fault had been fixed and most of the websites were back to normal.
The first response would be because Fastly – an American company founded in 2011 in San Francisco that has about 1,000 employees – has many customers. The cloud is where the services we access without being on our device are hosted: from Gmail to Dropbox to any page on the internet or the devices we have at home, such as Alexa or Google Home. Many of the affected pages belonged to the media. Although in most cases the news remained visible, when users tried to access their home pages, they were met with an error message.
The first sign that something was going on came shortly before noon. Fastly then announced that it was investigating a “potential impact on its content delivery services”. The problem quickly spread to thousands of sites around the world amidst the bewilderment of millions of users who expressed their concern or surprise and searched for information on social networks, unable to consult most media directly.
Fastly then updated the information on the incident several times, limiting itself to stating every few minutes that it was still investigating it. However, at 11:44 UTC, the company assured that the problem had been identified and was being fixed. “Users may experience improved page loading while global services are being restored,” the company said.
Finally, nine minutes before 2 p.m., Fastly said the incident was over. “We have observed the recovery of all services and have resolved this incident,” they said in a message on their website, although they also warned that their customers’ pages could still suffer some loading problems.
Among the affected websites, in addition to those mentioned, were those of the British Government, Spotify, Vimeo, Shopify, CNN, El Mundo, The Guardian, Vice, the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, the Stack Overflow developers’ forum, the Github project hosting platform and the Thingiverse catalogue of 3D printing projects. Don’t these events make you think that all the work and infrastructure of the companies is constantly hanging by a thin thread? Let us know what you think in the comments!
