Today has been chaotic in more ways than I care to count at this cursed hour, but the worst of it was definitely when like, half the entire fucking digital world just crashed in a wide-spread internet outage. Including the image servers for our own beloved site, can you believe.
Amazon, Reddit, Twitch, Pinterest, Spotify, Hulu, CNN and even the UK Government (???) were some of the major sites that took a hit during the sudden internet outage. Leading news sites like The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, The Sydney Morning Herald and even yours truly were down (but luckily, for us it was just our images).
People online obviously panicked, and most flocked to Twitter, which was still live, in a sea of chaos and confusion. People were either trying to figure out what could possibly cause such a huge internet outage (hackers?), or just stared into the abyss of 503 error messages, letting the trauma of loose connections wash over them (me… that was me).
Lot of the net just gone down – Le Monde, Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Independent, Guardian, HMRC. IT'S STARTED. JEFF BEZOS HAS TURNED THE INTERNET OFF BEFORE FLYING OFF TO SPACE. I TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN.
— Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) June 8, 2021
Others were just roasting Twitter for surviving this 30-minute apocalypse and I’m glad some of us still have a sense of humour when the internet disconnects. I, do not.
The whole internet going down except Twitter is like cockroaches being the sole survivors of a nuclear explosion
— Jack Sommers (@jack_sommers) June 8, 2021
Reddit, Twitch, Amazon, AWS, Spotify and half of major internet web sites are down, and Everyone is rushing to Twitter to check if it’s true.
Twitter rn: pic.twitter.com/Sem2SS2izV
— SVM (@ShivamChatak) June 8, 2021
With the internet down people flock to twitter for their news, which is the equivalent of looking in the fridge for food and not finding any so having to search the bin instead.
— TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) June 8, 2021
It turns out it was the content delivery site Fastly that suffered a major outage. Fastly is basically a cloud computing services company, and their service keeps your internet speedy (or as speedy as it gets here in Australia) by serving content from servers that are closer to you.
A CDN figures out what server is closest to you and serves you content on that server (this sounds like a tongue-twister that I do not care for), and it’s this CDN that carked it around 8pm tonight.
There was less than 90 minutes between Fastly figuring out something was wrong and then fixing it, and things are pretty back to normal now. I will say, it’s definitely not great to know that one company having technical difficulties can fuck over so much of the online world – but hey, that’s late stage capitalism baby.
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