One Fastly Customer Triggered Internet Meltdown

One Fastly Customer Triggered Internet Meltdown

One Fastly Customer Triggered Internet Meltdown image: internet

A MAJOR internet blackout yesterday, Tuesday, June 8, that hit many high-profile websites was apparently caused by a software bug.

A MAJOR internet blackout yesterday, Tuesday, June 8, that hit many high-profile websites was apparently caused by a software bug. The cloud-computing company responsible for the issues, Fastly, has said that the bug was caused when one of its customers changed their settings.

The blackout has now raised concerns about relying on only a few companies to run the huge infrastructure that supports the internet, Yahoo News reports.

The company apologised, saying that the issue should have been anticipated. The blackout, which lasted around an hour, affected popular websites such as Reddit, Amazon, Twitter And Spotify and affected millions of users.

Fastly senior engineering executive Nick Rockwell said: “This outage was broad and severe – and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.”

The company operates servers at strategic points around the world to help customers move and store content close to their end-users. However, a customer legitimately changing their settings had caused a bug in a software update issued to customers in mid-May that caused “85 per cent of our network to return errors”, it said

Around 40 minutes after websites had gone down, around 11 am BST, engineers figured out the issue, Fastly said.

“Within 49 minutes, 95 per cent of our network was operating as normal,” it said.

The company has deployed a bug fix across its network and promised a “post mortem of the processes and practices we followed during this incident” and to “figure out why we didn’t detect the bug during our software quality assurance and testing processes”.

Written by

Laura Kemp

Originally from UK, Laura is based in Axarquia and is a writer for the Euro Weekly News covering news and features. Got a news story you want to share? Then get in touch at editorial@euroweeklynews.com.

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