Massive Fastly internet outage causes swathes of websites to go dark

Countless websites, including major news outlets, were offline after an outage at Fastly, a cloud computing provider. One of the reasons the Fastly outage seems so wide in scale is that cloud computing service companies like Fastly are consolidating, leaving websites dependent on a shrinking number of providers. And they can be very difficult to detect early on when you’re thinking about making that change, because the systems are so complex and they involve so many moving parts.” In the case of Fastly’s Tuesday outage, the issue appeared to come from a bug that was introduced back in May when the company deployed some new software. But the issue was only discovered on Tuesday when a customer’s routine change to its systems triggered the bug — and inadvertently brought down much of the internet, according to a summary released by Nick Rockwell, the company’s SVP of engineering and infrastructure.Central to the challenge of systems like Fastly’s, Meiklejohn said, is the fact that these cloud computing systems can involve tens of thousands of servers deployed across the world.