A global internet collapse leaves web pages without service

Internet failure has affected some of the main pages in the world. It generated a huge global alert on Tuesday. Besides, it has revealed once again the vulnerability of digital connections at a time when companies and users depend more than ever on them.

A content delivery network, CDN, which provides its services to multiple websites, has caused Amazon, The New York Times, Twitch, Financial Times, or Reddit to suffer from problems. In some cases, they remained inaccessible for their users. However, about 50 minutes later, the company reported that the bug had been fixed, and most websites have returned to normal.

Many of the affected pages belonged to the media. Although the news remained visible in most cases, when trying to enter their main pages, the user encountered an error message. 

Last December, a general drop in Google services (Google, Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, and the cloud storage service) due to an internal storage problem also spotlighted the enormous dependence of millions of companies and users of internet services.

The first sign that something was happening came just before midday. At the time, Fastly announced that it was investigating a potential impact on its content delivery services. The problem quickly spread to thousands of pages worldwide amid the bewilderment of millions of users who expressed their concern or surprise. They searched for information on social networks due to the impossibility of directly consulting most of the media.

The world’s biggest websites went down

The company where the incident originated is a cloud service provider. It provides image service on Amazon and emojis on Twitter. Therefore, although the social network did not suffer the fall, the display of photos and emoticons were affected. Taking a significant drop, like they did today, can cause those services not to function normally. Furthermore, the centralization of the main services in a few hands causes the fall of one of the main ones to affect a large part of the most used pages.

Among the affected pages, in addition to those mentioned, were websites such as the British Government, Spotify, Vimeo, Shopify, CNN, The Guardian, Vice. Among them were also the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, the Stack Overflow developer forum, the project hosting platform Github or the Thingiverse 3D printing project catalog.

The fact that a service provider has so many clients implies that if it suffers a failure in its servers, which are spread worldwide, many Internet pages suffer the effects. And this is not the first time it has happened. Other companies dedicated to speeding up access to web pages, such as Cloudflare or Amazon Web Services, have suffered similar problems in the past.