Global internet outage blamed on software bug

Fastly, the cloud computing services provider behind the global internet outage experienced by a number of major websites on Tuesday, said the incident was caused by a software bug.

Nick Rockwell, Fastly’s senior vice president of engineering and infrastructure, said in a blog post that the global outage had been caused by an “undiscovered software bug.”

The issue caused outages for a number of highly trafficked websites, including The New York Times, Bloomberg News, the Financial Times, The Guardian and Reddit.

“On May 12, we began a software deployment that introduced a bug that could be triggered by a specific customer configuration under specific circumstances,” Rockwell wrote. “Early June 8, a customer pushed a valid configuration change that included the specific circumstances that triggered the bug, which caused 85% of our network to return errors.”

“We detected the disruption within one minute, then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal,” he added.

Rockwell acknowledged that the circumstances that caused the outage were “specific,” but said, “we should have anticipated it.”

Going forward, he stated that Fastly would be looking into how it operated during the incident and determine why it did not detect the bug sooner.

“This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them,” Rockwell wrote.

Apart from media sites, the British government’s website, Amazon.com and the streaming service Twitch were all reported affected by the outage.

More than 2,000 people reported having an issue with Amazon’s website yesterday.