Fastly claims global internet outage on June 8 was caused by 'undiscovered software bug'

After a Global internet outage on June 8, the content delivery network (CDN) provider Fastly said that it was due to an “undiscovered software bug”. Multiple news websites, including, BBC, the New York Times and CNN, went offline and users attempting to access the sites were shown error messages. Apart from new websites, other sites, including Pinterest, Reddit, Twitch and Spotify, were also down after the outage. 

In a statement, Nick Rockwell, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure at Fastly said, “We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change”. 

Nick added, “We detected the disruption within one minute, then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95 per cent of our network was operating as normal”.

Further, he also said that the company was “truly sorry” for the impact of the “broad and severe”  outage on its customers. Nick even went on to inform that in the short term, Fastly will be deploying the bug fix across its network immediately and will be conducting a complete post mortem of the processes and practices during the incident. He said that even though there were specific conditions that triggered the outage, the company should have anticipated it. 

“We provide mission-critical services, and we treat any action that can cause service issues with the utmost sensitivity and priority. We apologize to our customers and those who rely on them for the outage and sincerely thank the community for its support," Nick said.

Global internet outage

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, several websites were either working improperly or not loading. The error on high-profile websites was first reported by users who flagged “Error 503 Service Unavailable" pages being displayed while attempting to log on to a number of them. While some of the web pages showed “fastly error” others termed the glitch as “unknown” such as for BBC. Fastly reported an issue with its content delivery network (CDN) services. 

Fastly is a content delivery network (CDN) company that assists users to view digital content in a faster way. Apart from CDN services, it is also known to provide security, video delivery, and other edge-computing services. Some of its customers are giants including Slack, Airbnb, Spotify, and Stripe. The latest global internet outage, as per the Financial Times product manager, is also due to an ‘obvious glitch’ in the popular CDN provider, Fastly.

(With inputs from ANI)