The worldwide internet outage which led to websites Amazon and Twitter to crash on Tuesday, was down to the work of one person changing their settings! A disaster for website workers like the author of this piece!
Visitors were unable to access sites for an hour on Tuesday 8 June at around 11am.
HMRC websites, along with the New York Times, Bloomberg and the Guardian were also shut down.
Other websites affected included Pinterest, PayPal, the FT, and eBay.
Visitors trying to access these sites were met wit the message "503 error" on their screens. The message also warned of a "connection failure".
It has since been confirmed that this inconvenience was caused by one Fastly customer adjusting ther settings.
Fastly are a service that are designed to speed up loading times for websites. They have since apologised for the outage, admitting they should have anticipated this.
"We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change", said the vice-president of engineering and infrastructure Nick Rockwell.
"We detected the disruption within one minute, then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration", he added.
“This outage was broad and severe, and we're truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them".
Fastly confirmed that they will conduct “post mortem of the processes and practices we followed during this incident”.
They added that they will “figure out why we didn't detect the bug during our software quality assurance and testing processes”.
Fastly's service requires it to sit between its clients and its users. This means that any wide-scale failure is likely to block users from websites.
People took to Twitter to express their frustration.
One person called it an "internet apocalypse".
"Everything just shut out of nowhere", another added.
Another wrote that the internet was "broken".
On Tuesday, June 8 at 10-58am, Fastly reported that it was to investigate this issue, calling it a "global disruption".
Almost an hour later, the company stated that the problem had been identified and fixed.
All websites have since been restored and are working as normal.
"We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online", a spokesperson for Fastly said.
On June 8, we experienced a global service interruption. Here is what happened — and what happens next.https://t.co/gffDur5Moh
— Fastly (@fastly) June 9, 2021
