Major Outage at Fastly CDN Disrupts Internet Services Globally

Major websites across the globe suffered an outage when a configuration error at cloud computing giant Fastly was deployed to all of its POPs (Points of Presence) globally.

Fastly are one of the world's largest Content Delivery Network providers resulting in this outage affecting many of the most prominent sites on the net. Those taken down include The Guardian, The New York Times, Paypal, Spotify, CNN and others.

The problem resulting in millions of users being presented with a HTTP 503 Error (Service Unavailable) while other users were returned errors such as "Fastly error: unknown domain." 

Fastly acknowledged the issue on their service status page at 5:58 am EDT and the problem appeared to be resolved around one hour later.

Fastly, along with AWS and Cloudfare, provide the majority of the world's CDN capacity and incidents such as this, while rare, highlight the reliance on only a handful of content delivery providers.