"Who is Fastly?" was the question which passed everyone's minds when the recent outage of top websites. It showed "Error 503 Service Unavailable" to the websites of Amazon, Reddit, Twitch, and other UK-based government agencies.
Fastly Was Recently Down, Immediately Back to Service
Truly, questions do arise when an unfamiliar name, topic, or entity has been mentioned to have caused a massive outage in websites that are frequently visited by the public worldwide. Yesterday, at around 6 AM ET (3 AM PST), the services of websites were down and showed Error 503, a fairly new warning compared to the popular "Error 404: Content Not Found."
The outage was mostly attributed to Fastly, but the issue was immediately resolved after an hour, a swift response during these times. Fastly was identified as a content delivery company (CDN) which explained why the websites were down.
What is more surprising here is that Amazon has its CDN called Amazon CloudFront under the AWS, yet they were affected.
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Who is Fastly?
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - SEPTEMBER 10: Fastly Co-Founder Gil Penchina speaks onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt at Pier 48 on September 10, 2014 in San Francisco, California.
Fastly is a content delivery network based in San Fransisco, California, and was founded by Arthur Bergman and Gil Penchina in 2011. It identifies itself as the "edge of cloud platform," and provides tools to partner domains and developers to build their websites on, featuring different applications and tools to better the look of a certain page.
With all this said, it just shows that Fastly is an extremely important factor in making websites work, and ensuring their connectivity online. Moreover, problems within Fastly and its services only show that it would affect said websites from functioning well, particularly those heavily reliant on its services.
Good thing is that its recent response to the "technical problems" it experienced within the company was resolved immediately, and that allowed certain companies to return to normal.
There is a massive list of affected customers of Fastly, and it includes UK's government website, HBO Max, PayPal, Venmo, BBC, Spotify, Twitter, and others.
What is a CDN?
A website's domain is its own, and the content and its architecture are made by the parent company or the company that owns it, but they mostly use CDNs to deliver most of their content online. Apart from their architecture, they need someone or something to deliver their massive content online, and that is through a content delivery network.
Fastly is one CDN, and Amazon CloudFront is another, but Amazon Web Services and CloudFlare are also among those which function as content delivery networks.
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Written by Isaiah Richard
