Media and government websites suffer temporary outage [Video]

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Following a mishap from cloud computing services provider Fastly, several government websites and media outlets across the world experienced outages.
• The temporary shutdown lasted for over an hour on Tuesday.
• Experts said that such glitches could have a lasting global impact because there are only limited providers like Fastly.

Big media companies and government websites across the world had been offline for over an hour following a technical glitch from cloud computing services provider Fastly.

At around 1000 GMT on Tuesday, the temporary shutdown spread across the US, as well as in the other parts of Europe. Government websites such as the White House and the UK government and major media outlets like the New York Times, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times all prompted “Error 503 Service Unavailable” and “connection failure” messages upon site visit.

The error was later pointed to Fastly, a digital firm based in San Francisco that provides “speed up loading time” services to global websites.

After the outages, the firm announced via Twitter that “the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”

It also said that their global network “was coming back online” as most sites had already been back to normal.

Aside from the mentioned sites, other European media outlets like France’s Le Monde newspaper, Italy’s Corriere delle Serra, and Spanish daily El Mundo were down when the glitch occurred. Entertainment site Reddit and e-commerce company Amazon also fell victim to the outage, as well as other web pages in the Nordic region and Forsakringskassan, the Swedish social security service. 

“The impact is huge. It’s gone and affected millions of web pages and thousands of companies that rely on their services,” ESET cybersecurity specialist Jake Moore told AFP.

Moore also said that since there are few companies, like Fastly, which offer specific services, any malfunction would immediately yield a huge impact globally.

“If they go down, then of course we then see lots of companies fall over and panic,” he added.

Oxford Internet Institute research analyst Corinne Cath-Speth also backed Moore’s statements.

“Almost all internet websites use content delivery networks and cloud services,” she tweeted.

“So when those @fastly services fail or falter — it has major ramifications for everyone’s internet experience.”

“This in turn–raises major questions about the dangers of (power) consolidation in the cloud market & the unquestioned influence these often invisible actors have over access to information,” Cath-Speth added.

Fastly, which earned over $291 million last year, manages hundreds of billions of daily requests across the world. Its services are vital to internet accessibility.

Source: Yahoo News