And that’s not all! CDNs don’t just store content closer to the devices that crave it. They also help direct it across the internet. “It is like orchestrating traffic flow on a massive road system,” says Ramesh Sitaraman, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who helped create the first major CDN as a principle architect at Akamai. “If some link on the internet fails or gets congested, CDN algorithms quickly find an alternate route to the destination.”
So you can start to see how when a CDN goes down, it can take heaping portions of the internet along with it. Although that alone doesn’t quite explain how the impacts on Tuesday were so far-reaching, especially when there are so many redundancies built into these systems. Or at least, there should be.
CDNs Consolidated
Again, it’s not clear exactly what happened at Fastly. “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “Our global network is coming back online.”
“Service configuration” can mean any number of things; the only certainty is that whatever the root cause, it had wide-ranging effects. According to Fastly’s incident report page, every continent other than Antarctica felt the impact. Even after Fastly had fixed the underlying issue, it cautioned that users could still see a lower “cache hit ratio”—how often you can find the content you’re looking for already stored in a nearby server—and “increased origin load,” which refers to the process of going back to the source for items not in the cache. In other words, the cupboards are still fairly bare.
That an outage ..
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