On June 8, 2021, Tuesday, a large number of significant websites including Amazon, Reddit, and news distributors like The New York Times went down for an hour due to a widespread internet outage. The outage began at around 6 a.m. ET, with users revealing they were getting error messages including “error 503 Service Unavailable” or “Connection Failure” when tried visiting some websites.
What is Fastly and Why did this Outage happen?
Fastly is a cloud computing service provider based in America and operates a content delivery network. CDNs are the batch of servers and data centers spread across the world to streamline the assets required for loading the content on the internet. This massive outage affected dozens of countries across Europe, America, and Asia, along with South Africa.
There were speculations that Fastly may have become the victim of Cyberattack. However, Joshua Bixby, CEO of Fastly, told the Wall Street Journal that it was not related to cyberattack rather it was caused by a service configuration. Fastly improves load times for websites and offers different types of assistance to websites, applications, and platforms. It accomplishes service by storing the content, sites, and applications on servers that are nearer to the user who is attempting to get to a specific site or app. But since Fastly gives a support layer between internet companies and users attempting to get to services provided by them, when it goes down, admittance to those platforms can be impeded totally.
we have seen such cases earlier also such as – Amazon’s cloud computing unit AWS experienced an issue in 2017, a portion of the world’s greatest sites went disconnected for a few hours across the whole U.S. East Coast. In 2019 U.S. web security firm Cloudflare encountered a difficulty that lasted for an hour and affected websites including the dating website OkCupid.
There is no error-free CDN, however, the measure of success is how fast a major CDN firm like Fastly can retrieve from a rare outage like this. In the case of Fastly, its team took about an hour to recover the outage.”
Kartik Donga 
Sunil Patel 