On Tuesday, a global blackout affected many major international media sites, institutional sites, as well as Amazon. For several tens of minutes, these sites were inaccessible and those who attempted to enter them received an error code 503 or “service unavailable”.
But rest assured, this was not a large-scale hack, but rather a bug with a cloud computing service provider. On Wednesday evening, the San Francisco-based company Fastly finally explained the causes of the giant blackout. According to her, this outage was caused by a manipulation that was done by one of her customers, but which affected almost all other users of her services.
“On May 12, we began a software deployment that introduced a bug that could be triggered by a specific customer configuration under specific circumstances. In early June 8, a customer pushed a valid configuration change that included the specific circumstances that triggered the bug, resulting in 85% of our network returning errors, ”a press release read. by Fastly.
More specifically, the outage began at 9:47 am on Tuesday, universal time (UTC). Then, the problem was detected after one minute. And subsequently, the company isolated the cause of this problem, and deactivated the configuration that caused the failure. And after 49 minutes, 95% of the network was restored. However, given the number of affected sites and their traffic, the economic impact was likely immense.
