Major Internet Outages

[The Don]

There are reportedly issues with Fastly which provides cloud computing.

UK government websites have 503 errors.

https://twitter.com/ruskin147/status/1402210037553041409?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^tweet


edited to add.....

A number of leading media websites are currently not working, including the Guardian, Financial Times, Independent and the New York Times.

The UK government website - gov.uk - is also down.

Affected websites displayed the message: "Error 503 Service Unavailable".

Early reports have suggested it could be related to Fastly, a cloud computing provider, which underpins a lot of major websites.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57399628

 

[Michel H]

Fastly has posted some explanation on their Twitter account:

We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online. Continued status is available at:
CDN Performance Impact
https://status.fastly.com/

The latest message on their status website:

Monitoring - The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.
Jun 8, 10:57 UTC

 

[catsmate]

Yeah, it's been an issue in some locations for hours, though I believe it's fixed now. The dangers of CDNs and the one basket model.

 

[Belz...]

Yeah, it's been an issue in some locations for hours, though I believe it's fixed now. The dangers of CDNs and the one basket model.

You'd think we would've learned from a long history of one-basket policies.

 

[dudalb]

You'd think we would've learned from a long history of one-basket policies.

True, but in some situations you are more or less stuck with one basket solutions.

 

[Michel H]

The Guardian has published an interesting article on this outage:

Major internet outage ‘shows infrastructure needs urgent fixing’

Experts say outage shows internet services too centralised and lack resilience

(https://www.theguardian.com/technol...-warning-error-cloud-websites-offline-outage/).

Perhaps there should always be emergency servers ready to take over, in case the main CDN ("content delivery network") fails.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

Thought decentralization was the point of CDNs.

 

[Michel H]

Thought decentralization was the point of CDNs.

I assume that, when the Guardian journalists wrote:

Experts say outage shows internet services too centralised

they meant that (just) one company handles a large percentage of the world's internet traffic, so that, if one of their software engineers makes a big mistake, the consequences can be serious.

They probably didn't mean "centralized" in a geographical sense, because Fastly does have servers all over the world: https://www.fastly.com/network-map/.

 

[dudalb]

Thought decentralization was the point of CDNs.

It is, but they probably did not want to spend the money to make it really effective.