Popular websites such as the Age, Reddit, Twitter, Amazon, New York Times, CNN, BBC, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe and locally, The Guardian, Nine, SMH and The Age were affected, including Channel 10 and 10play and 7plus were all impacted by a CDN failure managed by US based CDN provider Fastly. Also Governments around the world were impacted, for example, websites using the gov.uk domain were impacted by the outage and also the Whitehouse.
What is CDN?
A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. Content owners especially media companies and e-commerce brands use CDN to deliver their content to their end-users as quickly as possible. Popular CDNs include Fastly, Cloudflare, CloudFront on Amazon Web Services and Akamai.
What went wrong?
For 45 minutes a huge array of websites received a blank white page and an error message telling them the connection was unavailable. This wasn’t a cyber attack. Fastly announced on Twitter that a service configuration had triggered the disruptions, and had been disabled.
Fastly reported on its website that the incident affected over 80 service locations across the Asia-Pacific, North America, South America, South Africa, India and Europe
We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online. Continued status is available at https://t.co/RIQWX0LWwl
— Fastly (@fastly) June 8, 2021
None of brandsec’s clients seem to have been impacted by this outage but we are monitoring the situation for any residual or repeated issues.
About brandsec
Brandsec is a corporate domain name management and brand protection company that looks after many of Australia, New Zealand and Asia’s top publicly listed brands. We provide monitoring and enforcement services, DNS, SSL Management, domain name brokerage and dispute management and brand security consultation services.