The global internet outage that brought down some of the world's biggest websites was caused by a software error, Fastly said.
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He immediately said that a software problem had been caused when one of his customers changed his settings.
When this happened, it began a series of problems that brought down many of the world's biggest websites. Reddit, Amazon, the UK government, and many of the world's biggest news outlets were unavailable, with users seeing a series of error messages.
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“This outage was widespread and severe, and we are truly sorry for the impact it has had on our customers and everyone who relies on them,” Nick Rockwell, Fastly’s senior vice president of engineering and infrastructure, said in a post.
He said the problem should have been anticipated.
Fastly manages a group of servers strategically located around the world to help customers move and store content close to their end users quickly and securely.
The company's post provided a timeline of events and promised to investigate and explain why Fastly failed to detect the software bug during the testing process.
Fastly said the bug was in a software update sent to customers on May 12, but wasn't activated until an unknown customer made settings changes that triggered the issue "which caused 85% of our network to return errors.".
Fastly noticed the outage within a minute of it happening at 9:47 a.m., and engineers resolved the issue at 10:27 a.m. When they disabled the settings that were causing the problem, most of the company's network quickly recovered.
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"Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating normally," the company said.
Networks were fully restored at 12.35pm and a permanent software fix began rolling out at 5.25pm, Fastly said.
Source of information: independent.co.uk
