It is crazy to think about how much of our internet rests on the shoulders of a single entity. When a content delivery network (CDN) called Fastly experienced an outage on Tuesday, sites like CNN, Amazon, and The New York Times went dark. The outage happened at around 6 am Eastern time and lasted for about an hour.
According to cloudflare.com, “A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.” Basically, content delivery networks are vital to providing users with fast distribution of Internet content. Giant corporations like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon depend on these CDNs to keep operations up and running.
One tiny technical failure and the world wide web was thrown into chaos. Luckily, the folks at Fastly live up to their name, and people didn’t have to wait long before they could get back to their morning news. “Looks like it is slowly coming back," said Kentik internet infrastructure expert Doug Madory. “It is serious because Fastly is one of the world's biggest CDNs and this was a global outage."
In a statement released by the company, the cause for the global breakdown was identified as a “technical issue.” Experts like Madory quelled any concerns of something more sinister, like a cyber attack or a hacking, saying that “even the biggest and most sophisticated companies experience outages. But they can also recover fairly quickly.” The outage mainly affected Europeans as it occurred when most Americans were still asleep in their beds, blissfully unaware that the very fabric of the internet was tearing apart.
With the glitch fixed and the internet back to normal, people are free to continue on with their daily routines. If one hour was enough to send the tech companies into a scramble, what would happen if we had to go a whole day without internet? A week? A month?! Hopefully we never find out.