"Fastly's Global Internet Meltdown Could Be a Sign of Things to Come"
Many popular websites, including Amazon, Reddit, PayPal, Spotify, the Guardian, the New York Times, and more, faced an hour-long outage on the morning of June 8. The issue was traced back to the cloud computing company Fastly, which provides a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to the impacted sites. CDNs are an essential part of the Internet infrastructure as they are designed to alleviate performance bottlenecks. A CDN is a system consisting of computers or servers that store copies of data across a network's various points. When the CDN fails, the websites that it supports cannot retrieve their data, which then forces them offline. The major outage to Fastly's CDN resulted from an internal software bug triggered by one of the company's customers. Though the incident was resolved within an hour, it is estimated to have cost Fastly's clientele hundreds of millions of dollars. This incident brings further attention to the fragility of the Internet that is routed through a few channels. The failure of one major channel can lead to significantly disruptive and expensive consequences. Cybercriminals will increasingly attempt to bring down multiple organizations simultaneously through targeted hacking of one organization. It is important to address this vulnerability in order to avoid another global Internet meltdown, not caused by code but instead by cybercriminals. This article further discusses the Fastly Internet outage, recent disruptive hacks resulting from the drive towards the centralization of online services, and the importance of going beyond multi-sector taskforces to avoid Internet meltdowns.