Global internet outage affects major websites

Several websites, including those belonging to the British government, Amazon, Hulu, Reddit, Spotify and Quora, went down around 3.30pm (IST) for an hour on Tuesday, after US-based cloud computing services provider Fastly faced an outage. Even news portals and publishers, including Guardian, New York Times, CNN, BBC, Forbes and Financial Times, were down.According to downdetector.com, users in India also had trouble accessing Google services, including Drive and Search.
The global outage occurred because of glitches in Content Delivery Network services provided by Fastly. CDNs transmit most of the world’s internet traffic through data centres placed strategically in different parts of the world. Fastly essentially acts as a third party between its clients and the end users through CDN services. These services provide vital but behind-thescenes cloud computing “edge servers” to many of the web’s popular sites. The servers store, or “cache”, content such as images and video in places around the world so that it is closer to users, allowing them to fetch it more quickly and smoothly. According to the firm’s website, it even has data centres in New Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai.
Fastly acknowledged a problem around 3.30pm IST. About an hour later, the company issued a statement on Twitter: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally... Our global network is coming back online.” POPs are Points of Presence, and indicate “the point at which two or more different networks or communication devices build a connection with each other”.
Users who tried logging on to sites that were affected could see error messages including “Error 503 service unavailable” and a terse “connection failure”. The outage caused a furore online, with several people taking to Twitter globally to report the disruptions. According to Trends24, a website that tracks real time trends on Twitter, Fastly was the top trend globally around 5pm.
Widespread internet outages are less common today than years ago, as Google and other major tech companies develop interconnected data centres that improve performance, but there have been a number of incidents over the last year. In December, Google services including Gmail, Maps and YouTube crashed for about an hour. The firm attributed the problem to an “authentication system outage.”
Outages like the one on Tuesday, in which many of the affected sites belonged to news outlets, often hit businesses in the same sector because they rely on the same third-party services, said Marie Vasek, a lecturer in information security at University College London.
(With inputs from NYT)