This Week's Mass Internet Blackout Was Caused By One Person Attempting An Update
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Featured Image Credit: Fox
As I'm sure you probably noticed, a good chunk of the internet went down earlier this week.
On Tuesday Fastly, one of the internet's biggest content delivery networks completely crapped the bed, taking a ton of popular websites with it. Reddit, Amazon, The Verge, and even all UK government web pages returned errors, and it was close to an hour before it was finally fixed. That's like a million years in internet time. People had to use Twitter. It was horrifying.
As it turns out, this mass outage was all down to one single user who had attempted an update. Little did they know this would bring the internet to its knees.
Since we can all use the internet again now, why not back and enjoy some of the funniest livestream wins and fails below?
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In a recent interview The Guardian (via PC Gamer), Fastly head of infrastructure and engineering Nick Rockwell, shed some light on the blackout and stressed that the company was sorry for the size and scope of the issue.
"On May 12, we began a software deployment that introduced a bug that could be triggered by a specific customer configuration under specific circumstances," Rockwell explained. "Early June 8, a customer pushed a valid configuration change that included the specific circumstances that triggered the bug, which caused 85% of our network to return errors."
In other words, a bug had been floating around the system since May 12, but it wasn't until a customer updated their settings on June 8 that it was woken up. Rockwell says Fastly spotted the issue immediately, and "within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal."
Despite the fact most sites weren't down for that long, SEO agency Reboot estimates there were some major consequences. Amazon, for example, lost nearly $32 million in sales. Excuse me while I take the day off to try and come to terms with that tragic fact.
