On June 8, 2021, the internet broke down. CNN, The New York Times, the UK Government, Amazon, Paypal, the Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Verge, along with thousands of other government, news and social media web sites – all fell off the grid. The western hemisphere was still in dreamland; most of us had not even had our morning coffee yet. It happened just before 6 am EDT.
This mass internet outage made it to the top of the Twitter news. At the centre of it all was “Fastly”. The name says it all: Fastly is….fast. Fastly is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that allows us (the impatient public) to view web sites, apps and videos at high speed and at high quality. On average, it services greater than 800 billion requests per day. Is it any wonder that it burned out?
For the non-techies, the lingo is curious: API, WAF, DDoS, POPs, Tbps. But here is a statement that makes an impact: “The World’s Leading Companies Count on Fastly” and with that, Fastly proudly presents the logos of Shopify, The New York Times, Boots, Stripe and A&E on its home page.
Fastly uses an “edge cloud platform”. Cloud computing – now that’s something that may sound more familiar. Cloud computing, believe it or not, did not start with iCloud. It is rooted in a concept proposed by Dr. Joseph Carl Robnett (J.C.R.) Licklider, that a network of computers would be able to communicate with each other from the other side of the globe. This was 1963. Salesforce would begin to hone in on the modern day concept of cloud computing by offering a web-based application to clients in 1999. And in 2006, “cloud computing” made an appearance in Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s remarks at the “Search Engine Strategies Conference” in 2006.
“The Cloud” is an indeterminate space in the internet where computer networks store data, allow access to software tools (apps) and provide services, obviating the need to store large amounts of data in the hardware of your personal computer. Think of it as a huge parking lot. Even if it is in the cloud, up in the sky, you still need to pay for parking. And it does not come cheap. It has been dubbed, “a trillion dollar paradox”.
So what went wrong in the wee hours of June 8, 2021 that even the world’s biggest players could not fix The Cloud? According to The Guardian, all it took was one Fastly client who updated their settings and thereby triggered a bug that already existed on May 12, 2021. Not that this crippled Fastly financially, for it was able to rebound with a 12% increase in its stocks as a result of demonstrating to the public that they were able to resolve the crisis within 49 minutes. Interestingly, it was estimated that Amazon could have lost $6,803 for every second of this internet outage.
The next time you get a popup message saying that it is time to update your settings – think twice. You just might break the internet.
