Because the New York Times, BBC, CNN, Guardian and FT sites went haywire
What happened to the thousands of Internet sites around the world. Here are the details
Thousands of websites around the world, from Amazon to Kickstarter, from the Guardian to the Financial Times, are inaccessible.
When attempting to load the homepage, error 503 appears, indicating that the server is unable to provide the requested content, due to failure or overload.
On Twitter, some users point the finger at a possible malfunction of Shopify's widespread Content Delivery Network.
Non-accessible sites include Reddit, Twitch, Pinterest, Spotify, Github, StackOverflow, Quora, Cnn, Bbc, and New York Times.
Judging from the list, Fastly's Content Delivery Network platform, whose homepage is inaccessible, appears to be non-functional.
No problem, however, for the social networks Facebook and Twitter.
The reason for the inaccessibility of thousands of websites around the world is a technical problem in the cloud systems of Fastly and Amazon Web Service.
Fastly, one of the most used companies in the world for Content Delivery Management services, or the server network that allows the consultation of contents, explained that it is still investigating the reason for the disservice.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are one of the fundamental parts of the global internet infrastructure.
These companies operate global server networks to optimize the performance and accessibility of web services.
The CDNs work as intermediary servers and store data on the server as close as possible to the end user.
Without CDs, any information would have to be transmitted from the original server, perhaps to the other side of the world, every time a page is loaded.
Over time, the offering of CDNs has become increasingly sophisticated and includes numerous security services ranging from DDos protection (i.e., mitigation of distributed denial-of-service attacks) to web application firewalls that obstruct traffic from suspicious customers.
In addition to Fastly and Amazon Web Service, Cloudflare, CloudFront and Akamai are among the most used CDN providers.
Today's crash does not seem to be limited to single server nodes but appears global, according to the agency Agi .
What does Fastly do (and what has it done)
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Updates:
The Content Delivery Networks (Cdn) company Fastly announced that it had solved the technical problem that had made thousands of websites around the world unreachable. Most of the affected sites, which included some of the world's leading newspapers, returned to normal operation, although some homepages were slow to load. Crashes were also reported by several customers of Amazon Web Services, which operates another CDN network but relies on Fastly for some cloud services. The blackout, extended to the whole world and not restricted to a specific network of servers, lasted about an hour.
The failure of the Content Delivery Networks that made thousands of websites around the world inaccessible for an hour only concerned the Fastly server network and not that of Amazon Web Services, as had been reported by some users. This is clarified by a note from the company, which explains that the Amazon Web Services services have continued to operate normally.
(article updated at 3.30 pm)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/perche-i-siti-di-new-york-times-bbc-cnn-guardian-e-ft-sono-andati-in-tilt/ on Tue, 08 Jun 2021 11:44:16 +0000.