Fastly Reports Software Bug that Triggered Internet Outage

Fastly Inc., the company which was behind a major global internet outage this week, in a recent announcement, had stated that the incident was caused by a bug that was present in its software, which triggered when one of its customers changed the network settings. The outage that occurred on Tuesday raised several questions about the reliance of the internet on a few infrastructure companies. Fastly's issue knocked out high-traffic websites, which also included major government websites.

Fastly primarily operates a group of servers strategically that have been placed around the world to help customers store content close to their end-users quickly and safely. The company post gave a timeline of events and promised its customers to examine and explain why it has failed to detect the software bug during its testing process.

Fastly said the bug was in a software update shipped to customers on May 12 but was not triggered until one unidentified customer carried out settings changes that triggered the problem, which caused 85 percent of the network to return errors. The outage was broad and severe, and it had a massive impact on Fastly's customers and everyone who relied on them. The company immediately apologized to all its users on its blog post.

 

Internet Outage Brings Down Several Major Retail and News Websites

Earlier this morning at 6.44 AM (Eastern Time), many governments and news websites in the U.S. and Europe were inaccessible, with at least one internet outage tracker reporting widespread disruptions. Sites like the U.K. government's main public-services portal, major U.S. and European news outlets, such as the New York Times, CNN, and Le Monde, were shut down.

Down Detector, an internet services tracker, reported the spike in outages. Many social media users described widespread outages in various regions. Fastly, an operator of the network service said issues with its services, though it was unclear whether the broader website outages were related. The company stated that it is currently investigating potential impact to performance with its CDN services.

Fastly's status page indicated the company had identified a problem with its service, stating that a fix was being implemented. Fastly also observed traffic volume to drop by about 75 percent, according to network monitoring company Kentik Inc. Most of the websites went down and displayed a simple error message in plain text, which said "Error 503 Service Unavailable," along with other codes.