What is Fastly and how did a CDN disruption break so much of the internet?
Huge swaths of the internet were inaccessible for users around the world on Tuesday after a major provider of cloud computing services experienced a disruption. The outages affected a number of news sites, including the The New York Times, Financial Times, Vox Media, and others, as well as large online platforms, such as Twitch, Pinterest, and Reddit. Fast Company and its sister website, Inc., were also affected. In a series of status updates Tuesday, cloud services provider Fastly referred to a global disruption of its content delivery network, or CDN. It later said that it had identified the cause and quickly began to deploy a fix. Affected websites began to slowly come back to life on Tuesday morning. The service disruption included not only the front end of websites but also the back end, leaving many news providers with no ability to access their content management systems.