Countless popular websites including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and Financial Times are currently facing an outage. A glitch at Fastly, a popular CDN provider, is thought to be the reason, according to a product manager at Financial Times. Fastly has confirmed it’s facing an outage on its status website.
“We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” the firm said.
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a key part of the internet infrastructure. These companies run global networks of server to improve performance and availability of web services. CDNs act as proxy servers and cache some data as close to the end user as possible. For instance, media content is often cached to a CDN server near you so that it doesn’t have to be fetched on the original server every time a user loads a web page.
Over time, CDNs have started adding more features, such as load balancing, DDoS protection, web application firewalls and several security features. Popular CDNs include Fastly, Cloudflare, CloudFront on Amazon Web Services and Akamai.
Fastly in particular is quite popular with media websites in particular. The company went public in 2019. Fastly shares (NYSE:FSLY) are currently trading at $48.06, down 5.21% compared to yesterday’s closing price.
This is a developing story. More to follow…
