CDN goes down; many sites face world wide outage

There has been a stir due to the massive internet outage across the world. According to reports, major international news websites and portals including The New York Times (NYT), CNN had gone down due to this. Preliminary report states that due to a problem with a private CDN (Content Delivery Network), a technical glitch in the Internet has come to the fore. More information is being obtained about this. According to the news, all the popular websites Reddit, Spotify, PayPal, Shopify etc. had also been impacted by it. Sites like Guardian, New York Times, BBC and Financial Times have also faced this problem. It is believed that this happened due to a problem with the popular CDN provider Fastly.

CDNs i.e. Content Delivery Networks are considered to be the basic part of Internet infrastructure. Companies like Fastly improve their web services through global networks of servers. For example, media content is collected by your local CDN server and you don’t have to go to the origin server every time you load a web page. This allows the web page to load in less time and reduces the risk of crashing despite the heavy traffic on the website.

The British government website gov.uk was also stalled. ‘Error 503 Service Unavailable’ is showing in the websites that are facing this problem. Fastly said that it is trying to address the problems faced by the global content delivery network. Although why this problem has arisen, it is difficult to say anything about it. Nothing has been said yet about any cyber attack or other outside interference.

According to the BBC, this Internet problem seems to be local, which is why its effect has been seen only in Europe and America. Some experts on Twitter have also raised the question of the entire infrastructure of the Internet being in the hands of only a select few companies. They say that sometimes a small problem takes a formidable form because of this.