Massive Global Internet Outage: Fastly Issue Sparks Service ‘Disruptions’

‘Cloud isn’t any different than on-premises—with both cloud and on-premises you need to make sure you have the right architecture,’ says LAN Infotech CEO Michael Goldstein.

A massive global internet outage Tuesday impacted a number of websites as a result of a service configuration issue at content delivery cloud provider Fastly.

Fastly confirmed in a Twitter post that a service configuration “triggered disruptions” across its network globally. Fastly said it had moved to disable that configuration.

“Our global network is coming back online,” the company said in a Twitter post at about 7:15 a.m.

Among the websites impacted were bulletin board website Reddit, video streaming service Twitch and a number of news sites including CNN and The New York Times, according to Downdetector.com.

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Downdetector.com, which provides real-time outage monitoring, showed huge spikes in complaints about outages at Hulu, Amazon and others.

Michael Goldstein, CEO of LAN Infotech, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., solution provider, said the global outage shows how critical it is for customers to properly architect their cloud and on-premises network.

“Cloud isn’t any different than on-premises—with both cloud and on-premises you need to make sure you have the right architecture,” said Goldstein. “We make sure that when we put mission-critical applications in [Microsoft] Azure for our customers we have multiple data center regions to prevent an outage like this. You need a fail-safe and a continuity plan to prevent outages. A lot of it is dependent on how much the client willing to pay for continuity services.”

Goldstein said the outage shows once again why it is critical for customers to work with trusted solution providers to architect their cloud and on-premises environments. “We like to say an educated consumer is our best customer,” he said.

A top executive for a solution provider, who did not want to be identified, said the disruption is one more reason why hybrid cloud architecture is winning the day.

“When you put all your eggs in one basket, you leave yourself open to outages like this,” said the executive. “There are no easy answers to maintain 100 percent uptime. You need to do the best you can to have contingency plans in place for an outage. This is why it is important to be working with a solution provider that has the expertise and knowledge to provide consulting and ongoing communications and monitoring.”

The solution provider credited Hewlett Packard Enterprise with staking out an early position in hybrid cloud ,which has proved to be prescient. “Hybrid cloud should be the new norm,” said the executive. “With [on-premises cloud service] GreenLake you can have that cloud-like experience while still having control of your applications on-premises. It is a much more flexible approach and you can react quicker to outages.”