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Front & Center
How the internet got broked :-P~
If you were to be perusing the interwebs early Tuesday morning, you would have immediately noticed something awry. Websites like Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, eBay, Twitch, Pinterest, many news sites, and even government service pages were showing Error: 503 messages, which typically appear when a website is under maintenance. Many took to message boards to find the cause, and even though service was restored before people started hoarding toilet paper again, it wasn’t until 24 hours later that a root cause was identified -- and it turns out that it was a single, Fastly customer… imagine being that person.
No. What’s Fastly?
Fastly is a San Francisco-based cloud computing service provider that effectively makes loading times faster for websites (ah, Fastly, got it.) Yeah, it also optimizes images, videos and other large content to show up quickly when you load a web page. It does this by storing some website data from international websites in local data servers, instead of having to fetch them from faraway host servers every time. This “edge computing” method, which can be thought of as distributed fulfillment but for information, also performs various cybersecurity functions.
So who fudged up? I want names.
Okay psycho. Fastly sits between back-end web servers and the front-facing internet that we see, so any error in their system can cause entire websites to be unavailable. On June 8, one UNNAMED customer (but pictured at the end) accidentally triggered a bug during a “valid configuration change”, which caused 85% of the company’s network to display errors. Within 60 seconds, the Fastly team identified and disabled the configuration, and within 49 minutes, 95% of the network was operating as normal. Quick work.
Could it happen again?
Fastly announced that it will be taking several steps to avoid outages in the future, including root-cause analyses and a complete evaluation of their bug-fix and deployment processes.
If you feel stressed by more and more companies falling victim to ransomware attacks and now the internet is going down, it may help to step away and take a breather this summer.
Want a free getaway?
Use code SHIPHERO123 at your front door to walk outside and enjoy the roses. Check out this botanical garden directory for roses near you, and tell them ShipHero sent you for complementary staff confusion.
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