The San Francisco based company responsible for taking major website offline

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Something similar to a digital apocalypses happened on Tuesday, June 8, when major websites went offline for about an hour.

The interruption of their internet service, started at around 6 a.m. ET, users started to report they were receiving error messages including “Error 503 Service Unavailable” and “connection failure” when visiting various websites including amongst others; The New York times, Twitch, Vimeo, Reddit, Shopify, CNN, El Mundo, The Verge, Financial Times, Vice, or CNN.

The company responsible for the chaos that made headlines all over the world is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) named Fastly, an American cloud computing services provider headquartered in San Francisco and situated between an scuba diving shop and an old US post office.

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The firm initially said they were investigating a technical issue. Via their Twitter account they confirmed that they had “identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions” across its clusters of machines globally.

Fastly operates what’s known as a Content Delivery Network, or CDN.

To put it simply, CDNs are networks of servers and data centers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.

The main reason why Fastly failure affected major companies is because they mainly work with big businesses, whereas their biggest competitor, Cloudfare, tend to focus in small and medium size bussinesses even if Discord, Dropbox or Pinterest do use Cloudfare services.

Nick Rockwell, Fastly Senior Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure, said via statement;

We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change. We detected the disruption within one minute, then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal.This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.

According to the company what happened had its origins on May 12 when a software deployment introduced a bug that "could be triggered by a specific customer configuration under specific circumstances".Then by early June 8, “a customer pushed a valid configuration change that included the specific circumstances that triggered the bug, which caused 85% of our network to return errors”.

Even though the issue was quickly resolved, the outage put in question the monopoly of the few companies where majority of the internet infrastructure is concentrated. A large part of the internet relies on just a handful of companies like Fastly, Google or Amazon for all its servers and web services.

What happened Tuesday was just a very clear example that the centralisation of the internet on a handful of technology giants mean that single points of failure can result in global outages. The monopoly is never healthy particularly in a world where the internet is key in our lives.

Fastly has now provided a timeless of the outage :

09:47 Initial onset of global disruption

09:48 Global disruption identified by Fastly monitoring

09:58 Status post is published

10:27 Fastly Engineering identified the customer configuration

10:36 Impacted services began to recover

11:00 Majority of services recovered

12:35 Incident mitigated

12:44 Status post resolved

17:25 Bug fix deployment began

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