What caused the recent outages in Reddit, Twitch, Pinterest and other popular websites?

An exhaustive list of websites, which include Reddit, Twitch, PayPal, Amazon, Github, Stack Overflow, HBO, Quora, Shopify, Vimeo, and several news outlets like CNN, The Guardian, New York Times, Bloomberg News faced an outage today. An outage of this stature occurs rarely, and has thus been a subject to news, views, discussions, and ridicules all around the world. Twitter being the receptor of such news has obviously been flooded ever since the outage was first discovered.

What caused the outage?
How long was the outage observed?
What should you know about Fastly?
Did it also affect India?
FAQ

What caused the outage?

The recent outage that affected a massive number of popular apps and websites around the globe has supposedly occurred due to the technical glitches experienced by Fastly, a popular American cloud-computing and CDN service provider.

Fastly has reported that it has been experiencing issues with the CDN services on Tuesday afternoon and has also informed the same on its Twitter. The firm announced, “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.”

As soon as Fastly declared about the outage they were facing, the other websites started to experience similar problems. The users who tried to visit the above-mentioned websites during the outage seemed to be stuck with a screen that says "Error 503 Service Unavailable".

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How long was the outage observed?

The outage was first reported at 3:28 pm, Tuesday, June 8, 2021, by the Fastly systems, and it continued to disrupt the services on some major platforms till 5:27 pm when Fastly applied a fix. So, it was an outage that lasted for 2 hours, according to Fastly.

However, the cloud computing giant also informed that users around the world might continue to face difficulties in accessing several websites for some time after it has already been fixed by Fastly.

What should you know about Fastly?

Fastly is a popular CDN services platform that helps speed website loading times with the help of “edge cloud.” This technology boosts the loading time of the websites along with helping them to tackle denial-of-service attacks or the cyber-attacks that try to deliberately maim a particular machine or network resource.

Fastly is one of the most popular service providers in North America and South America that powers some of the prominent online media websites. This is the reason why the majority of the complaints were discovered in the Northern and Southern regions of America.

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Did it also affect India?

The Fastly-induced downtime that was experienced extensively across North and South America also affected some parts of India. Fastly, which operates in the Indian cities of New Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai also experienced issues with its operations and has cited “Degraded Performance” in these regions.

Conclusion

Though the Fastly issue that the world experienced today was “global CDN disruption” and was not limited to a particular data center, the global cloud service provider acted swiftly and ended the outage faster than it was thought of!

However, such continuing outages that had also earlier affected Amazon Web Services, raises questions on the evolving internet infrastructures and why they are limited to a countable list of companies.

FAQ

What is fastly used for?

Fastly is a content delivery network (CDN) company that helps users view digital content more quickly.

Which companies use fastly?

A total of 812 companies reportedly use Fastly including tech giants like Netflix, HBO, PayPal etc.

Who are fastly competitors?

Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Akamai, Google, and Microsoft are competitors of fastly.