"Huge parts of internet currently offline" - BBC News

[Peter C]

From Auntie Beeb:

Websites begin to work again after major breakage

Cloud computing provider Fastly, which was behind the problems, said it was implementing a fix.

www.bbc.co.uk

A number of leading websites are currently not working, including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch.
The UK government website - gov.uk - is also down as is parts of the BBC and a host of other media outlets.
Affected websites displayed the message: "Error 503 Service Unavailable".
Early reports suggested it could be related to Fastly, a cloud computing provider, which underpins a lot of major websites.
Fastly said it was investigating problems with its content delivery network.

They were also reporting that the sites of the New York Times, Guardian, and Financial Times were offline. Quite the story it seems, even if it only lasts for a short amount of time?

-Peter

EDIT: The BBC News article is updating as time goes on, and this has just been added:

In an error message posted just before 11am BST Fastly said it was "currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services."
It has not yet provided a formal statement.

www.gov.uk is working for me now - the problem may have been sorted?

 

[brad465]

The BBC site itself was part of this, although I can now access it. The Financial Times site though I read is still affected, and even the COVID ZOE site seems to be affected as well.

 

[Peter C]

The BBC site itself was part of this, although I can now access it. The Financial Times site though I read is still affected, and even the COVID ZOE site seems to be affected as well.

The Guardian's site is working for me now. They've got this article on there:

Massive internet outage hits websites including Amazon, gov.uk and Guardian

Technical problem traced to network run by Fastly brings some sites down entirely

www.theguardian.com

A massive internet outage, affecting websites including the Guardian, the UK government’s website Gov.uk, Amazon, and Reddit has been traced to a failure in a content delivery network (CDN) run by Fastly.

The outage, which began around 11am UK time, saw visitors to a vast array of sites receive error messages including, “Error 503 service unavailable” and a terse “connection failure”.



As well as bringing down some websites entirely, the failure also broke specific sections of other services, such as the servers for Twitter that host the social network’s emojis.

Fastly, a cloud computing services provider, was believed to be the cause of the problem. The company runs an “edge cloud”, which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic.

But that technology requires Fastly to sit between most of its clients and their users. That means that if the service suffers a catastrophic failure, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all.

In an error message posted at 10.58 UK time, Fastly said: “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.” The company did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.

The increasing centralisation of internet infrastructure in the hands of a few large companies means that single points of failure can result in sweeping outages. A 2017 problem at Amazon’s AWS hosting business, for instance, took out some of the world’s biggest websites for several hours across the entire US east coast, while a 2020 problem with Cloudflare, another CDN company, led to a half-hour outage for most of the internet in major cities across Europe and the Americas.

-Peter

 

[Paul Jones 88]

Could this be a new type of terriost activity?

 

[eastdyke]

Could this be a new type of terriost activity?

That might depend upon your definition of 'terrorist activity'

 

[Busaholic]

Could this be a new type of terriost activity?

Doubt it would have been sorted so quickly if it had been.

 

[Geezertronic]

Someone at Fastly dropped the ball and stuffed up, it happens...

 

[brad465]

Someone at Fastly dropped the ball and stuffed up, it happens...

Turns out one of their customers changed their settings, and this was enough to bring the whole thing down thanks to a software bug:

One Fastly customer triggered internet meltdown

The unnamed customer was not to blame but changing settings triggered a software bug, Fastly says.

www.bbc.co.uk

A major internet blackout that hit many high-profile websites on Tuesday has been blamed on a software bug.
Fastly, the cloud-computing company responsible for the issues, said the bug had been triggered when one of its customers had changed their settings.
The outage has raised questions about relying on a handful of companies to run the vast infrastructure that underpins the internet.
Fastly apologised and said the problem should have been anticipated.
The outage, which lasted about an hour, hit some popular websites such as Amazon, Reddit, the Guardian and the New York Times.
Fastly senior engineering executive Nick Rockwell said: "This outage was broad and severe - and we're truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them."

 

[Peter Mugridge]

Turns out one of their customers changed their settings, and this was enough to bring the whole thing down thanks to a software bug:

The internet equivalent of the Christmas tree lights cutting the whole house out...

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Someone literally broke the internet?! Who'd have thunk?!

 

[Geezertronic]

Someone literally broke the internet?! Who'd have thunk?!

To be pedantic, this was a failure in a Content Delivery Network system that sits on the internet. Although it is actually quite easy to "break the internet" if someone maliciously wanted to and had the access to

 

[eMeS]

... and to think that not long ago we were being told how resilient and multi-threaded the Internet was (and by design); so we all relaxed...

 

[brad465]

Second time in two months:

Major websites hit by global outage

The websites of HSBC, British Airways and Airbnb are among those to have briefly gone offline.

www.bbc.co.uk

Many popular websites fell offline on Thursday in a widespread global outage of service.

Visitors attempting to reach some sites received DNS errors, meaning their requests could not reach the websites.

Affected services included Airbnb, UPS, HSBC bank, British Airways and the PlayStation network used for online games.

One popular DNS provider, Akamai, reported "an emerging issue" with its Edge DNS service.

It has now tweeted that the issue has been fixed and "the service is resuming normal operations".

Internet outage monitoring platform DownDetector had reported thousands of problems from its users across dozens o platforms.

And it looks like it affected this article's spelling a bit with the "dozens o platforms" (either that or it's written in historical story speak).

 

[WelshBluebird]

Different provider this time - Akamai today. Had a fun end of the day at work since we use them on a fair few clients. Does show how much we rely on just a handful of companies.