Fastly CDN Server Issue Brings Down Swathes of Websites [Update: Solved]

[MacRumors]

Vast swathes of the web are currently offline, including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC News, Bloomberg, and Financial Times sites.

The outage is down to a glitch in content delivery network provider Fastly's servers. Fastly has confirmed it's investigating an outage on its status website. Having nothing to do with Fastly, none of Apple's services are currently impacted. MacRumors.com and the MacRumors forums continue to operate as normal.

Update: After identifying the issue, Fastly says it has implemented a fix that seems to be allowing most affected websites to recover from the outage.

Article Link: Fastly CDN Server Issue Brings Down Swathes of Websites [Update: Solved]

 

[diddl14]

https://stackoverflow.com also down, largest global coffee break..

 

[GadgetBen]

Phew. I thought my Mac wasn't working. Rebooted it twice.

MacRumors bang on with the essential news once again.

 

[arkhanjel]

My ISP is down at the moment as well. I wonder if it’s related?

 

[Unggoy Murderer]

https://stackoverflow.com also down..

As a developer, I'm screwed. GitLab and GitHub being down too is just insult to injury.

 

[technofunky]

Why is everyone using Fastly "only", there has to be a backup.

Edit: their own site is even down ... https://www.fastly.com/

 

[laptech]

CDN will explain it off as some kind of software glitch but in a number of months time of even a year we will here that they were the victims of a cyber attack.

 

[mogzieee]

Can confirm here in the UK that the BBC isn't affected, at least for me. Might be overseas it's a problem.

 

[Apple_Robert]

CDN will explain it off as some kind of software glitch but in a number of months time of even a year we will here that they were the victims of a cyber attack.

Hopefully, it isn’t hack related. Maybe someone turned off the lights out of habit when leaving the basement. . J/k

 

[tom.humphrey]

Can confirm here in the UK that the BBC isn't affected, at least for me. Might be overseas it's a problem.

As another UK person, BBC.co.uk doesn’t seem affected but some of its other sites do (bbcgoodfood.com for example)

 

[Unggoy Murderer]

Can confirm here in the UK that the BBC isn't affected, at least for me. Might be overseas it's a problem.

Definitely not overseas only. Gov.uk website is down (which is major). Amazon.co.uk was also borked.

Not that I'd ever recommend going there anyway, Guardian.com is also down.

 

[Unggoy Murderer]

CDN will explain it off as some kind of software glitch but in a number of months time of even a year we will here that they were the victims of a cyber attack.

There is nothing to suggest this is a cyber attack or a "hack". Please stop spreading disinformation, it doesn't help at all.

 

[timmyh]

Can confirm here in the UK that the BBC isn't affected, at least for me. Might be overseas it's a problem.

Sorry, I meant the BBC News website, corrected that in the article.

 

[ruka.snow]

Why is everyone using Fastly "only", there has to be a backup.

Edit: their own site is even down ... https://www.fastly.com/

Half the web use Cloudflair and half use Faslty (this isn't 100% as there is also Akamai and a few others, but you get the gist). Very few can afford the complexity of having a load balancing DNS to two different providers and that could also mean having servers on AWS and Azure. It really isn't as easy as having a backup and it is very rare for one of the big CDN's to go down in full.

 

[wackymacky]

Well I’m glad I just checked to see if the MacRumors was working and saw this. I was getting multiple 503 errors on some sites and others fine; I thought it was a DNS error on my ISP as some of the sites were still working using VPN.

 

[OnawaAfrica]

that's why I don't include CSS or JS via CDN but download the files and include them in my projects directly so they don't depend on other servers.

 

[timmyh]

MacRumors.com is on CloudFlare which is why we're doing just fine.

 

[LiE_]

Can someone explain how this has killed the internet? What is fastly?

 

[diddl14]

ok everyone it's solved, now get back to work!

 

[Carlson-online]

As another UK person, BBC.co.uk doesn’t seem affected but some of its other sites do (bbcgoodfood.com for example)

That's because we've turned off our fastly cache

 

[Unsupported]

I have fastly.net "website data" on my iPhone in Settings -> Safari -> Advanced -> Website Data that I cannot delete!

It's been there for a long time and even after numerous iOS updates and reboots it's still there.

I want it GONE!

 

[Unggoy Murderer]

Why is everyone using Fastly "only", there has to be a backup.

Edit: their own site is even down ... https://www.fastly.com/

There are dozens of CDN providers including Cloudfront (Amazon AWS), Cloudflare, and Akamai are the big players. Trying to have a failover provider like that isn't a trivial task, and in fairness, events like this are pretty rare.

 

[polyphenol]

No idea how long it will take, but...

Identified

The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.

Posted 3 minutes ago. Jun 08, 2021 - 10:44 UTC

 

[ruka.snow]

Can someone explain how this has killed the internet? What is fastly?

Fastly is one of the big CDN's on the internet. Basically they give websites DDoS protection, cache assets around the world, allow webpages to be cached (with smaller calls to the server for dynamic areas). Almost all of the traffic on the internet goes through Fastly and Cloudflare. Then you have the big old one: Akamai.

 

[Krizoitz]

There is nothing to suggest this is a cyber attack or a "hack". Please stop spreading disinformation, it doesn't help at all.

I don’t think you understand what speculation and sarcasm are. OP wasn’t making any specific claim and a random comment on a random Internet forum is not “spreading disinformation”