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LONDON — The company soon suffered a major outage that caused many of the world’s best websites to stop working briefly this week, and blamed the problem on a software bug that ran when a customer changed the setting.
The problem with Fastly meant netizens were unable to connect to a handful of popular sites early Tuesday, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Twitch, Reddit and the UK government’s homepage.
“We experienced a global outage due to an undetected software bug that appeared on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid client configuration change,” said Nick Rockwell, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure at Fastly, in a blog post late Tuesday.
He said the outage was “widespread and severe” but the company quickly identified, isolated and disabled the problem, and after 49 minutes, most of its network was back up and running. The bug was included in a software update rolled out in May and Rockwell said the company is trying to figure out why it wasn’t detected during testing.
“Although there were certain circumstances that caused this outage, we had to anticipate it,” Rockwell said.
San Francisco-based Fastly provides a so-called Content Delivery Network — an arrangement that allows customer websites to store data such as photos and videos on different mirror servers across 26 countries. Keeping data closer to users means it appears faster.
But the incident highlighted just how dependent the global internet is on a handful of behind-the-scenes companies like Fastly that provide critical infrastructure, and heightened concerns about their vulnerability to more serious disruptions.
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