Fastly’s servers in San Francisco suffered a massive outage Tuesday that caused high-traffic websites like Hulu, Amazon, and The New York Times, to temporarily shut down, but the company said it had identified and fixed the problem about an hour after they hit.
Fastly is one of many cloud services providers on which companies rely on for their website speed and availability—a fact made evident by its quick response time when addressing the June 8th major disruption.
The Internet is a vast, sprawling entity which relies on many small players to keep it running smoothly. Despite the best efforts of these entities and their engineers, – occasionally things get fuc go buggy, and there is only so much they can do for us when the internet comes to a (49 minute) standstill.
Rise In Internet Vulnerability Concerning to Businesses
This isn’t the first time similar outages have happened. Last summer July 2020, In an effort to provide a better service, engineers at Cloudflare accidentally pushed huge amounts of internet traffic from their data centers in California and Europe to one location in Atlanta.
This caused it to fail and take down websites like Medium and the video game League of Legends. In 2019 Verizon mistakenly routed much its U.S.-based Internet traffic through a single ISP based out Pennsylvania, causing sites such as Amazon and FaceBook to go offline for hours on end.
Some of the most common reasons for Internet outages are: content delivery networks and internet service providers.
These services provide a lot to ensure that things run smoothly, but they’re still prone to outage due to their sheer amount of traffic or lack of companies providing them.
Content delivery networks and ISPs are always vulnerable to outages–even though the likelihood they’ll happen decreases with each passing outage.
Yet despite this progress in reliability, these services will likely continue being unreliable for years to come because there’s such an oversaturation of traffic on the web nowadays- not just from humans but also machines like bots – yet only few companies provide them in their entirety (think Amazon Web Services).
Some people think there’s an easy solution- more competition among these important websites would make it so no one was too reliant on any one company, currently there’s a small handful of providers for a very vast and complicated ecosystem.
The internet is an essential part of our lives. It’s how we connect with friends and family, get jobs, work from home, bank online, do homework for school or watch movies on Netflix. But it also has a dark side that can compromise both your data security AND daily living (the JBS attack last week hit home after it affected a plant in Greeley, Colorado and led to poultry shortages at my local grocery in the Denver metro area).
