You probably had problems during the beginning of this week when viewing content on some websites. A failure that has already been corrected and that basically affected the media. Although the content remained visible, when clicking to expand the information, it did not load and an error message appeared. A problem that was corrected after a few hours, but that created a lot of uncertainty. What could have happened? What were the causes of these failures? Places like Amazon or the newspaper The New York Times had suffered the inconvenience of the appearance of a message that informed that something was wrong.
Fastly , a CDN, was in trouble . But before continuing, let’s find out more about what is behind these acronyms. A CDN is nothing more than a Content Delivery Network that relies on server networks to deliver content quickly. Fastly, when he perceived that there were problems, issued a statement on Twitter in which he reported that he was trying to solve the incident, a protocol that is normal in this type of case. After a while, he reported that he had identified the cause of the problem and was getting down to work to prevent it from happening again. If you want to know a sequence of the events of everything that happened, in English, Fastly has prepared a tweet in which you can consult for more information.
What exactly does a CDN do?
Many websites have their content in one and this is in a physical place. The function of a CDN is to shorten the waiting times of a server, in such a way that the information is accessible quickly. To achieve this, they duplicate the content of the websites on several servers, including the one that is fixed, such as the page layout. But the fall of Fastly, which is the one who supports practically the Internet, has been responsible for these failures. If the frame is disassembled, those who depend on it will run into problems.
Fortunately, this failure is rarely common, but when it occurs, the weakness of the system is revealed. In addition, Fastly is a CDN mainly oriented to the business world , so those who have suffered the most from these failures have been major corporations. Sites like Reddit, Spotify, Vimeo, Twich or CNN itself.
A heavy reliance on CDNs
The main problem that has been evidenced with the fall of Fastly, has been none other than verifying that the 1800 million web pages that currently exist are hosted in the cloud services of three companies, these are Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft. On the other hand, there are three CDNs that are currently operating, one of them is the one that was out of service for a few hours, with the consequences already known.
It is striking that one of the pages dropped outside of Amazon, which has precisely its own CDN called Amazon Cloud Front . But the funny thing is that he does not use it for his own use, but rather offers it as a support for other companies. This way of thinking, that of not wanting what a company produces, has a meaning. In the event of a server crash, the company’s website would be safe. But Fastly’s own downfall has resulted in Amazon being shut down for precious time.
This failure could repeat itself in the future, in fact it will happen again, since as long as the CDN network does not strengthen or diversify, a simple failure can put the Internet in check again.
