If you were having difficulty accessing your favourite website on Tuesday, June 8, youre not alone.
A jaw-dropping number of major websites around the globesuddenly became unavailablewith no immediately obvious explanation beforereappearing an hour later.
How can so many sites, from so many different organisations, all be affected by the same incident?
What happened and whats a CDN?
Fastly is a cloud computing company that provides CDN services to arange of websitesincluding Amazon and Deliveroo.
But how can a single company bring down a noticeable proportion of the internet?
A CDN is a service that allows popular websites to keep copies of their pages closer to their customers.
And nobody likes delays.
However, modern websites often contain many elements, including images, videos and so on.
When combined, the speed improvement through CDNs can be significant.
So, why did so many sites fail?
CDN services provide a valuable service to improve our web browsing experience but at a cost.
If each website we visit hosted its own content exclusively, we would not be facing these issues.
Despite the global outage, it was resolved within about an hour.
That wouldseem to indicateits unlikely to have been a security- or hacking-related issue.
Could it happen again?
Fastly is not the only CDN provider.
Other high-profile services include Akamai and Cloudflare.
Outages arenot uncommon, but they are usually short-lived.
