Here’s Why Your Netflix and Amazon Blanked Out on Tuesday

Published on June 09, 2021 01:21 AM AEST

Here’s Why Your Netflix and Amazon Blanked Out on Tuesday — Image source: Tero Vesalainen, Shutterstock

Summary

Websites like Bloomberg News, Reddit Inc, the New York Times, and the UK government faced an outage.
Users across the world faced issues accessing BBC, CNN, and Guardian as well as Netflix and Twitch.
Fastly was able to fix the issue and said that it managed to identify the service configuration responsible for the disruptions seen globally across all its POPs, and it has been disabled.

All across the globe, websites faced an outage, including the likes of Bloomberg News, Reddit Inc, the New York Times, and the UK government websites. The outage happened after Fastly’s - a content-delivery network’s - services went down.

Users across the world complained to access issues to pages like BBC, CNN, and Guardian as well as Netflix and Twitch.

Fastly helps to push data swiftly across the internet; later it said it was able to fix the issue that caused the global outage. Those that were down earlier in the day appeared to have been restored.

What exactly happened?

Websites gradually began to be back online after a downtime of almost close to an hour, but the loading time was slow. Travellers filling up locator forms on the UK Government website for returning to the UK from Portugal and other places faced problems due to the outage.

Most popular webpages rely on a handful of big technology companies to host users and distribute content. Fastly is one of those companies that act as an application host and high-level website through which big companies serve the content of millions of customers simultaneously. A website called Downdetector tracking outages in services through the internet noted an increase in user-reported issues from Spotify, Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, and Twitch on Tuesday.

The issue specifically pertained to CDNs or content delivery networks that store copies of webpages that can be delivered quickly to users. CDNs aim to bring down the lag, known as latency, between a user making a response and the moment they receive the response. If the latency is high enough, the user experience suffers. But if the service suffers like it did today, companies that use it are prevented from working on the internet at all.

Also read: Google smashes Microsoft over hacks and media revenue payments

Users were seeing an error message like Error 503 Service Unavailable while they attempted to access these websites. Fastly itself had posted an error message that said it had impacted the performance with its CDN service being investigated.

Later it tweeted, saying it has managed to identify the service configuration responsible for the disruptions seen globally across all its POPs, and it has been disabled.

Huge outages like this are not uncommon. Some of the world’s biggest websites blanked out in 2019 because of a Cloudflare issue. The same problem resurfaced in August 2020, affecting Roblox, Visa, eBay, and many others. In November 2020, Amazon too had faced similar issues.

Cybersecurity experts said that whether the outage was malicious or otherwise, it shows how crucial these hosting companies are and what they represent.

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