Fastly outage takes out many major websites

cloudmate

At around 10am UTC on June 9th 2021, many prominent websites around the world started to display error messages, and not a lot else. Amazon, Reddit, Bloomberg, Twitch, Pinterest, AFR, Financial Times, NY Times, The Guardian, the BBC, the UK goverment's official site, and many others all suffered major outages, whilst others, including Twitter, lost partial content. It turned out that Fastly, who's edge cloud platform provides services to many major companies, had an undiscovered bug in their systems that was triggered, perfectly innocently, by a customer action which took down Fastly's CDN. A fix was rolled out about an hour later and services and sites started to come back online. Questions are now being asked about the prudence of so much of the Internet relying on single providers. Are they now, potentially, the single point of mega-failure?