Fastly Inc. (FSLY.N), the company behind a major global Internet outage this week, said Wednesday that the incident was caused by a bug in its software that was triggered when one of its customers changed its settings.
Tuesday's outage raised questions about the Internet's reliance on some infrastructure companies. Fastly 's problem affected high-traffic sites, including news sites such as The Guardian and the New York Times, as well as British government sites, Reddit and Amazon.com (AMZN.O).
"This outage was wide-ranging and severe, and we are truly sorry for the impact on our customers and everyone who depends on them," the company said in a blog post authored by Nick Rockwell, its senior engineering and infrastructure executive.
He said that the problem should have been anticipated.
Fastly operates a group of servers strategically placed around the world to help customers move and store content close to their end users quickly and securely.
The company's post demonstrated the timeline of events and promised to examine and explain why Fastly had not detected the software bug during its own testing process.
Fastly said the bug was in a software update sent to customers on May 12, but was only triggered when an unidentified customer made configuration changes that triggered the problem "that caused 85% of our error network to return."
They quickly became aware of the outage within a minute, which occurred at 0947 GMT, and engineers worked on the cause of the problem at 1027 GMT. Once the settings that triggered the problem were disabled, most of the company's network recovered quickly.
"Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was functioning normally," the company said.
The networks were fully recovered at 1235 GMT and began launching a permanent software patch at 1725 GMT, Fastly said.
Photo: REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
The original article, which is reported by Toby Sterling and edited by Edmund Blair at Reuters, can be read at: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/fastly-blames-software-bug-major-global-internet-outage-2021-06-09/
