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Fastly, the American content delivery network company, has reported a problem in their CDN services affecting websites that use its platform and due to its leadership in offering edge computing services that help serving digital content to millions of users in a secured faster way, more than 1 million live websites are using Fastly. According to backlinko & builtwith, among these websites are the most popular ones with high traffic like Amazon, Shopify, Reddit, The New York Times, Financial Times, Pinterest and much more.
Yesterday, the 8th of June 2021, thousands of internet users all over the world struggled to access different websites whether they wanted to check their favorite topics on Reddit, check daily news on popular news websites, purchase from Amazon, use their paypal accounts and many other activities.
According to The Guardian article, the outage extended to bring the UK government website down, obstructing citizens while booking COVID-19 vaccinations or filling critical passenger forms. It also affected the taxes online system and other important services.
Among the most affected users are those who run online businesses. Imagine running a Shopify ecommerce website on which your business & all marketing campaigns depend only to discover that it is suddenly not working or is showing a corrupted UI! That’s exactly what happened yesterday to many of our clients’ websites forcing us to stop our marketing campaigns that help boost their sales.
What was the reason behind this global network outage?
As we mention earlier, Fastly provides internet users with fast and secured access to a huge amount of digital data all over the world. In order to perform this function, they use a highly-distributed global networks of servers (CDNs) to cash the static digital content and serve it to users from a closer CDN server rather than the original server which might cause some latency. Unfortunately, Fastly encountered a huge problem in their CDNs harming thousands of websites all over the world.
How long did it take Fastly to solve this catastrophe?
At 11:58 am EET, Fastly informed users through their status page about the investigation of a potential impact in their CDN services. They kept users updated with the investigation process and after nearly an hour, they applied the solution and the services gradually returned.
What can we learn from yesterday’s catastrophic outage?
Yesterday’s catastrophe spotted the light on how much employees, businesses owners, governments and whole countries became dependent on the internet to manage their work, businesses, economies and major life activities. Although this shows the extreme power of technology, it warns us about its catastrophic problems we might face.
As we become increasingly reliant on digital platforms to run the economy, e-commerce systems, payment gateways, government services, all kinds of services, we are really becoming more vulnerable
Digital marketing agencies have an important role dealing with this type of catastrophes to minimize their clients’ loss and that’s what we are doing in ripplemark through a comprehensive analysis of any harms affecting businesses’ performance and tweaking our marketing activities based on the results.
If your business was greatly affected by yesterday’s catastrophe or you seek guidance to optimize your digital assets, contact us for a private digital consultation.
