Fastly’s outage: a big part of the web went dark
One customer setting triggered a bug that took down major websites for an hour. Know your single points of failure.
On Tuesday, many big websites, news sites, government portals and online shops, showed errors for about an hour. The cause: Fastly, a content delivery network many of them use. A valid configuration change by one customer triggered a hidden bug, and most of Fastly’s network returned errors.
Fastly fixed it fast and explained it clearly. The interesting part is how many sites depended on one company without thinking about it.
Worth checking:
- What sits in front of your site: CDN, DNS provider, firewall service, load balancer?
- Can you switch to a second CDN or straight to your origin, and how long would it take?
- Is your status page hosted on the same provider? Many were.
- Do your monitoring alerts run from outside that provider?
Not every company needs two CDNs. Every company should know it has one.