This Tuesday, the internet experienced a period of uncertainty and strangeness, as it was impossible to access large pages such as Twitch, Reddit, Amazon or even the media. After the reports of users, who pointed out that they could not enter these sites, the Fastly company explained that the problems were generated due to the fall of one of its CDN (Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network, in Spanish).
A CDN is nothing more than an infrastructure that helps to distribute content through the internet in a faster and more efficient way regardless of where the users of the website are, and in fact, these technologies are widely used by companies. that provide services on the internet, such as Spotify, which also had problems.
According to Fastly’s CDN services status information page, the incident started at 04:58 a.m. and after an hour they managed to detect the irregularities within their network and correct it. Therefore, currently the services work without any hiccups.
It is worth mentioning that this error affected those pages that are hosted in infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services or Azure, since their data goes through the Fastly CDN, which invariably produced a negative impact on them.
While this matter was being resolved, The Wall Street Journal had contact with Joshua Bixby, CEO of Fastly, who mentioned that they were investigating the problem, however, he clarified that the failures in the multiple services were not related to some type of cyber attack.
And that although they are invisible to end users, CDNs play a fundamental role in the operation of web pages, since they are a set of servers in different parts of the world where copies of the contents of the main web are stored, such as images, videos or documents, among others.
In this way, a page can work anywhere on the planet, as they have servers where their information can be replicated, in order to have a balance of traffic and, therefore, latency is reduced, while the speed access to the platform remains suitable to receive users.
On the other hand, it is relevant to mention that these types of services are usually managed by third parties. That is, although a web page is hosted on AWS servers, it also hires a service from specialized companies, such as Fastly, in order to provide its CDN networks to have servers in different countries.
So, if a CDN network has errors, the internet has problems in a similar way as if the central servers presented failures and those who suffer them are the users who connect to that infrastructure even without knowing it.
Despite the setbacks that they can generate, these types of services are relevant for the operation of the internet, since without them the request of users to enter a website would travel a much longer journey, which would directly affect the time of load.
