A "service configuration" failure at content delivery network company Fastly briefly knocked some of the internet's biggest news and other sites offline today, including the Financial Times, GitHub, and GOV.UK.
"We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online" Fastly admitted sheepishly just after noon on June 8.
The Fastly outage predictably triggered online hysteria in excitable corners about a massive DDoS attack. The cause appears to have been a more prosaic software update titsup of the kind that periodically affects everyone from Microsoft to Cloudflare. (The internet, it is worth remembering, is held together with duct tape.)
See also: Microsoft blames key rotation failure for Azure Portal outage. Improvements to “Safe Deployment” pending
Fastly, which has some 1,000 employees and an annual revenue of $200 million, Fastly lets websites cache everything at the edge, allowing faster response times, among other services. The outage affected customers globally, from Asia/Pacific to South America, EMEA and beyond.
It won't be the first CDN to briefly fall over.
Cloudflare in 2019 when deploying a new rule triggered a bug that caused CPUs to become exhausted on every CPU core that handles HTTP/HTTPS traffic on the Cloudflare network worldwide.
The regex-powered borkage brought down Cloudflare’s core proxying, CDN and WAF functionality.
Like Cloudflare, Fastly has responded fast and transparently.
Customers are largely likely to be forgiving.
