Imagine that you are a user of some cloud service platform. Any day you have the need to make some adjustments to the system and your actions generate the worldwide internet crash . Yes, it sounds like a comedy / tragedy story, but it was what happened yesterday when multiple websites, including Amazon, Twitch, Reddit, Twitter, and Spotify, to name a few, went offline due to a CDN issue. by Fastly .
Through a statement, Fastly explained how an innocent person unleashed the internet crash. First of all, it is important to mention that the user involved did not do it intentionally. He never imagined that his actions would make an apocalypse come true – as if living in a pandemic weren't enough. According to Fastly, on May 12 they rolled out a software update on their platform; the problem is that had an unidentified critical bug .
Interestingly, to activate the bug it was necessary to meet a series of specific conditions and settings in the account of any user. On June 8, a person made changes to the configuration of their service and, unfortunately, were exactly the parameters required to trigger the bug . Fastly says that 85% of its network had problems after the unfortunate event, which caused the failure of multiple Internet services and websites.
We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that emerged on June 8th. It was caused by a change in the configuration of a client.
The internet crash was avoidable
The good news is that platform engineers quickly identified the bug and rolled out an update to fix it. In 49 minutes they had already recovered 95% of their network. Obviously, Fastly is aware that this situation could have been avoided . So that it does not happen again, they are doing an investigation to find out why they did not identify the error during the software quality control process.
“Although there were specific conditions that triggered this disruption, we should have anticipated it ,” Fasly says. Of course, they took advantage of the space to offer their apologies. Not only to their customers, but also to the millions of Internet users who were affected by the global internet crash: “We apologize to our customers and those who depend on them for the disruption. We sincerely thank the community for their support.”
