'Undiscovered software bug' behind Tuesday's massive internet outage: Fastly
Jun 09, 2021
Washington [US], June 9 : After major news websites went offline due to Tuesday's massive but temporary internet outage, the content delivery network (CDN) provider Fastly said it was due to an "undiscovered software bug".
Multiple websites, including that of major news organisations such as the BBC, the New York Times and CNN on Tuesday went offline and users attempting to access the sites were shown error messages.
The New York Times, CNN, among other international news websites, along with popular websites like Pintrest, Reddit, Twitch, Spotify among others went offline after the outage.
In a statement, Nick Rockwell, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure at Fastly, said: "We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change."
"We detected the disruption within one minute, then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95 per cent of our network was operating as normal," he added.
He also said that the company was 'truly sorry' for the impact of the 'broad and severe' outage on its customers.
In the short term, Fastly will be deploying the bug fix across its network immediately and will conducting a complete post mortem of the processes and practices during the incident.
"Even though there were specific conditions that triggered this outage, we should have anticipated it. We provide mission critical services, and we treat any action that can cause service issues with the utmost sensitivity and priority. We apologize to our customers and those who rely on them for the outage and sincerely thank the community for its support," Rockwell said.
Major website and app outages happen from time to time and typically do not last long as internet service providers, content delivery networks and other hosting services are built with multiple redundancies and a global network of backup servers, reported CNN.
