Several big websites around the world went down for about half an hour because of a major issue with the content delivery network (CDN) of American cloud computing services provider Fastly.

Global internet outage: Which websites were affected?

• com, Reddit, Twitch, Spotify, Pinterest, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo and Shopify are some of the big names.
• Prominent news websites impacted were the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, CNN, and Verge, to name some.
• Most users would have seen a 503 error when trying to access these websites, indicating that the browser was not able to access the server.

What is Fastly?

• Fastly is a cloud computing services provider, which offers CDN, edge computing, cloud storage services.
• All of its geographies, including the three stations it has in India — Chennai, Mumbai and New Delhi — were suffering from “Degraded Performance”.

Answer this PYQ from CSP 2018:

Q.The terms ‘WannaCry, Petya, Eternal Blue’ sometimes mentioned news recently are related to

(a) Exoplanets

(b) Crypto currency

(c) Cyber attacks

(d) Mini satellites

What is a CDN?

• A CDN refers to a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
• They house content close to the telecom service providers’ networks.
• Majority of web traffic across the world today is routed through CDNs.
• Platforms such as Netflix, Facebook, Amazon — ones with large quantities of data held in global libraries — host their geographically relevant content closer to where that content is to be consumed.
• This ensures the end customer is able to access the content faster.
• Another reason companies rely on these CDNs is to help protect their sites against traffic spikes, distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, etc.

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