Hundreds Of Websites And Digital Services, Down Due To A Global Server Failure

A failure in Fastly, a content distribution network (CDN), has shut down or hampered the operation of hundreds of websites and digital services , from Spotify to Twitch, to media such as The New York Times or the BBC.

The company has taken 45 minutes to identify the problem, but it has already notified through its official website that it has solved it. Downdetector , specialized in service failures, has reported problems related to Fastly in a multitude of services, including Movistar, Github, Spotify, Vodafone, Cloudflare and Stackoverflow.

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The first failure in Fastly's network was identified at 11:58 a.m. on Tuesday and the incident was resolved almost an hour later, at 12:57 noon.

The newspapers and all the media have also been affected by the fall, which has left without access to some of the most visited websites in the world, such as the social network Reddit or the streaming platform Twitch . In the same way, services such as Twitter, Google or PayPal, although they have been able to continue working, have intermittent failures depending on the region from which they are accessed.

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Given today's Internet infrastructure, most websites and digital services require companies like Fastly, which host large parts of the Internet in huge warehouses full of servers. These respond to user requests to access the websites. If these servers are not available, it is impossible to access the pages in question even if the user's connection works perfectly.

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The case of Fastly goes a little further, since it is a CDN, a content distribution network. Its main function is to reduce delivery times by having a multitude of computer networks connected in different parts of the world. To do this, it hosts certain parts of said websites, such as images, links, applications and other elements that, being widely redistributed, load faster and relieve the load on the servers.

That is the reason why Twitter, which has continued to function during the incident, could not properly display the emojis of the tweets: these images were stored specifically on the Fastly network.

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Fastly is one of the many hosting companies that exist today. It is a business that generates great income, which is why multinationals such as Amazon or Microsoft have their own online hosting companies.

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