Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit and more go down in Fastly CDN outage
Countless popular websites including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and Financial Times are currently facing an outage.
According to Stackshare, 812 companies use Fastly CDN for their web services.
A glitch at Fastly, a popular CDN provider, is thought to be the reason, according to a product manager at Financial Times. Fastly has confirmed it’s facing an outage on its status website.
“We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” the firm said.
Fastly, the CDN provider, is having a massive outage, resulting in Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit, The Guardian, and the FT returning 503 errors.https://t.co/parKGKwrSU
— Matt 'TK' Taylor (@MattieTK) June 8, 2021
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a key part of the internet infrastructure. These companies run global networks of servers to improve performance and availability of web services. CDNs act as proxy servers and cache some data as close to the end user as possible. For instance, media content is often cached at a CDN server near you so that it doesn’t have to be fetched on the original server every time a user loads a web page.
Over time, CDNs have started adding more features, such as load balancing, DDoS protection, web application firewalls and several security features. Popular CDNs include Fastly, Cloudflare, CloudFront on Amazon Web Services and Akamai.
Fastly in particular is quite popular with media websites in particular. The company went public in 2019. Fastly shares (NYSE:FSLY) are currently trading at $48.06, down 5.21% compared to yesterday’s closing price.
Today’s issue isn’t limited to a data center in particular. Fastly calls it a “global CDN disruption” and it sounds like it is affecting the company’s network globally.
