We don’t know if you realized it or not, but we witnessed a day when the internet broke down. Although it got fixed very quickly and swiftly, the main thing is that it broke, and we are here to talk about that. So, on Tuesday morning, websites including Spotify, Reddit, eBay, Pinterest, and Twitch went offline due to a major outage at a service called Fastly. All you see is 503 errors and people complaining that they can’t access this or that. This goes to show that how much we rely on cloud computing services.
So, on Tuesday around 2:58 a.m. Fastly status update page showed an error. Which said, we are currently facing an issue and are checking for the potential impact of performance with our services. Just soon after that tweet starts flowing in that major news outlets like BBC, CNN, and New York Times are offline.
At first, everyone thought it was an isolated incident. But as the day progressed, it was found out that it is a massive outage that brought the whole kingdom of the internet to its knees. It was felt all over the world as people tried to access these sites, and all they got is a 503-error message.
What is Fastly?
So, if you are wondering what are we talking about Fastly going down. Well, Fastly is a cloud computing service provider which is based in San Francisco. The company has been around since 2011. Fastly upgraded their service in 2017 and launched an edge cloud platform. The main aim of this upgrade was to bring websites closer to the people who use them. It means if you are using a website that is not hosted in your country. It will just store some of the websites closer to you so that you don’t waste any bandwidth. When fetching the website’s content from a faraway network.
Due to this, the website runs faster, and the reload times are less, and the images are optimized. And high-end content also shows up quickly and smoothly when you land on a web page.
Now due to Fastly handling everything at the back end of web servers on the internet, we see. So, if Fastly goes down, it can cause the whole website to be unavailable.
What is a 503 error?
If you see a 503 error instead of the webpage you opened. It means that the servers that are hosting the webpage you are requesting can’t handle your request at this moment. This doesn’t mean that the problem will persist. It’s a short-time thing only.
The 503 error occurs mainly when the servers are being overloaded with requests or are under maintenance.
Why so many websites went down due to Fastly?
If you didn’t know how vast Fastly is, now you know after Tuesday’s worldwide outage of the internet. The reason why it is so widely used is that the service provided by Fastly are essential. And not many companies provide all these kinds of services. Also, a large number of websites are reliant on a small company to keep running. If you recall, this problem also occurred last November when Amazon Web Services went down.
Conclusion:
As Alan Turning Institute pointed out on Twitter stated that a technical hiccup in a single company could have such a huge impact all over the world. This raises the huge question about the power consolidation in the cloud market. How these industries are unknowingly controlling our world. And how these cloud computing gods have all the information they need at their fingertips. Hope you find this information useful.
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The internet was brought to its knees Tuesday, with 503 errors showing up across the news outlets and websites. A fix came just over an hour later.
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