Big websites, such as Amazon, Reddit, The New York Times, and even the UK government, failed to load yesterday (8 June). The Independent updated the situation via Twitter as their website appeared to be unresponsive, too. The most recent update regarding the issue identified the root of problem to be Fastly.

Fastly is an American cloud computing system that supports content delivery network for most news apps, such as CNN, The Guardian and The New York Times. The company provides highly demanded computer system resources, such as data storage, or cloud storage, and computing power. These services are delivered by building servers in many places to hold the data and the network.

The way that Fastly works is by helping customers load the content and aspects provided by each website by storing the content in servers close to where the consumers are. They act as a layer of support between content providers and their consumers. This is also the reason why when a problem occurs on their side, the impact is massive. About three quarters of traffic from Fastly was reportedly gone at around 05.49 AM ET and only began returning at 06.39 AM ET.

The error appeared to also cause an Internet outage for several areas. To understand this phenomenon, it is important to note that major websites and apps relying on services like Fastly are aware that problems happen. However, these problems do not last long because Internet service providers, content delivery networks and other hosting services are built with excess and global network backup servers. Therefore, when Fastly went down, it took other websites and online services along.

The services went back online by 7 AM ET with residual effects such as longer load time. Fastly managed to respond to the problem in under one hour.