What is Fastly and how did it kill the internet?

Today, visitors across the internet were greeted with an error when they visited some of the most viewed websites in the world, including Reddit, Twitch, CNN, the New York Times, and even Amazon.

“Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com” is the error that some people found when accessing CNN, with other websites such as the New York Times and the UK’s gov.uk read “Varnish cache server”, a technology that Fastly uses.

Ok, so let’s break this down, what is Fastly, and how did this happen?

Fastly is an “edge cloud platform”, or so it calls itself. It’s a cloud computing service that a lot of the world’s top websites use to help them store data, or “cache” content in their servers in different places in the world.

Think of it this way, if you want to access something on American website, a signal will have to travel all the way to the other side of the world to do so under normal circumstances. A service like Fastly allows that information to be served closer to you at different cloud storage units so that you can access information more quickly, so that a website doesn’t take too long to load and causing you to lose interest and click out.

Every millisecond matters in the world of the internet, and that’s why services like Fastly are so essential.

The downside, of course, is obvious. Without Fastly working, all those internets go bye-bye—at least temporarily.

Why did it go down? Those investigations are still underway.

Fastly, which is based in San Francisco, acknowledged the issue shortly after it happened, and it took about an hour before they said the issue was identified and a fix was applied.

“Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” they said.

Fastly was founded in 2011 but most people probably didn’t even know the name until now, which likely means they tend to do their job pretty darn well. They also provide denial-of-service attack protection, bot mitigation, and web application firewalls.