back to article Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

A not-inconsiderable chunk of the World Wide Web, including news sites, social networks, developer sites, and even the UK government's primary portal, has been knocked offline by an apparent outage at edge cloud specialist Fastly – though your indefatigable The Register remains aloft. Mid-morning UK time (09:58 UTC) today, …

  1. Alex Brett

    UTC

    I think you mean reports started at 09:58 UTC, or 10:58 BST (10:58 UTC is 9 minutes in the future as I write this)...

    1. Tom 7

      Re: UTC

      Do you want its fixed quickly or what?

    2. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: UTC

      Thanks, it was fixed. Please consider dropping corrections@theregister.com an email if you spot anything odd so we can take a look straight away.

      C.

  2. Savvo

    Explain to me again, I'm feeling really dumb today, why a single point of failure is a good thing.

    1. Lunatic Looking For Asylum
      Happy

      It's not single point of failure - it's the cloud, never happens according to my mate Gary in marketing...

      1. wallyhall

        Obligatory reference: https://xkcd.com/908/

        1. Red Ted
          1. David 132 Silver badge
            Thumb Up

            Or google'd Google?

    2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Because you can tell the Board that this will save money and Fastly is very reliable and the SLAs are quite reasonable and, even when things go wrong, it's not your fault.

      1. veti Silver badge

        Well, how quickly would you have fixed it?

    3. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Ben Tasker

        > It's only people who want access to all those services at once that experience it as a single point of failure.

        No, that's not really accurate.

        Even if you're only focused on Reddit (to pick one), Reddit is(was) down - the reason? They built a single point of failure into their setup by using a single CDN vendor rather than a multi-CDN setup (or, alternatively, have just realised some metrics their multi-CDN status checker should have been considering).

        What you're talking about - the fact that it broke a wide range of services is a *common* SPOF.

        Fastly is still a SPOF for each of these services, regardless of whether any other service was using them. That a large proportion of the internet seems to be down to users is because there's a common SPOF that's just failed.

        It's not reddit's job to avoid common SPOFs, but it is reddit's job (if they care about service availability) to avoid/mitigate SPOFs in the first place (though, really, cost comes into it too - you can mitigate most things, but it may not be worth the cost to mitigate the edge-cases)

        1. Danny 14

          it would be interesting to see how many other CDNs had ties to fastly and thus were also affected.

          1. Ben Tasker

            AFAIK, Fastly don't offer a white label service (the thing that allows other businesses to present it as their "own" CDN), so from a delivery point of view it shouldn't be any.

            But, anyone sane should be serving things like status pages through a seperate route, so it's quite possible that some others served theirs via Fastly, and the status page went down while service continued. Fairly small impact.

            But, those small impacts can get quite fun once you start thinking about the spread of lots of them - how many companies build/test pipelines failed because they rely on assets that get pulled down from a site/service that's fronted by Fastly's CDN?

            1. irrelevant

              The first twitter post I saw was someone querying github as a dependency was broken.

              The BBC posted a link to a breaking news item that I couldn't see because of the errors, 503 and connection failed. But after a brief "bbc.com does not exist" it started working. Someone said they'd switched away from Fastly, so I guess they had fallback measures in place, unlike most other places.

              I loved the verve using a Google Docs page to get the news out, and forgetting to disallow editing....

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Boffin

                One of the drivers for CDNs is the end user experience. If they are working, websites load more quickly and you've only got seconds before the user goes somewhere else.

                The Beeb is big enough and considers itself important enough to spend extra for multiple CDNs and a CDN switcher. Most websites don't. They are content with their users seeing quick page loads for all but a few hours of the year.

                It will be interesting to see if Fastly's transparency extends to letting us know what actually happened but whether or not they do I don't think it will affect their business much.

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Yeah, came here to ask the same thing.

                  Their communications were rather _terse_ weren't they? I'd say based on the example I have seen from here and elsewhere they were so light on detail as to be almost useless.

                  While I don't think it's fair to expect a running tweet storm during an outage, If they don't post a really good post mortem, it will ding their brand in my view.

                  Good news is there are other CDNs, and anyone using fastly should consider being able to use more than one CDN anyway as some of the others pointed out.

                  1. tip pc Silver badge

                    Re: Yeah, came here to ask the same thing.

                    The less they say the less they are liable for.

                    Also it’s likely those that where dealing with it where busy dealing with it and those who’s job it is to notify punters didn’t understand the details. Typically when you outsource it’s manager to manager comms and managers typically don’t do techy which is another reason for the lack of detail.

                    Who cares now, it’s up :)

                  2. Stuart Castle Silver badge

                    Re: Yeah, came here to ask the same thing.

                    re: "Their communications were rather _terse_ weren't they? I'd say based on the example I have seen from here and elsewhere they were so light on detail as to be almost useless."

                    I suspect their comms were aimed at the customer, who, when it comes down to it, probably just wants their website to work, not really caring about the details behind it. Also, they may not want the customer to know the technical details of their operations.

                    We don't use Fastly directly, but a few of the sites and systems we use do rely on it. While our systems techs wanted to know the ins and outs of why and how it happened (although I am unsure if they got it), the management wanted to know when it was fixed, so they could send out comms to the users to that effect.

                    1. Ben Tasker

                      Re: Yeah, came here to ask the same thing.

                      > I suspect their comms were aimed at the customer, who, when it comes down to it, probably just wants their website to work, not really caring about the details behind it.

                      Yup, it'll almost certainly be that.

                      Their update on the cause overnight was rather lacking in detail in my view - "it was a software bug" is very vague.

                      But... the average customer doesn't care that you accidentally introduced an off-by-one or something, so actually their update is probably just fine for the majority of their customers. Whereas I want to be sure it's not something we might accidentally do later, so want more technical details

                2. Dave559 Silver badge

                  "If they are working, websites load more quickly and you've only got seconds before the user goes somewhere else."

                  That's actually a misfeature for me. I genuinely thought the web was a much more fun place when you had to wait a few seconds for the interlaced GIFs and progressive JPEGs, that you had carefully created, to do their rendering thing before your very eyes… «wistful sob»

                  And, of course, such constraints meant there was none of the third-party bloatware and spyware stuffed into web pages then that we have to put up with now.

                  Yeah, I might grumble if a web page were to take 30 seconds or more to load, but I really could care less about 5 - 10 seconds (streaming content being one of few exeptions, and even then any sensible browser or app should be caching a good dollop before trying to play it).

                  1. Wayland

                    If you're watching something load then that can be entertaining in itself. However what usually happens these days is a delay with nothing happening then it all arrives in an instant. If you're staring at nothing happening then you think it's broken and move on. Those gifs resolving themselves would keep you on the page because you could see it was getting there.

                    1. heyrick Silver badge

                      "However what usually happens these days is a delay with nothing happening then it all arrives in an instant."

                      Yes, it's very annoying that browsers these days don't seem to be capable of on-the-fly re-rendering like in the old days. I get that it is probably because most connectivity is way faster than a 28.8kbps modem so dropping the continual rendering can help save power and stop flickering and such, however it's not a help at all when the entire site has stalled waiting on pulling some rubbish from this one stone age site, and all that's on screen is an empty white rectangle. I mean, surely it isn't hard to say "if nothing has happened in half a second, do a render"?

                      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

                        Often that's because what the browser downloaded was an HTML document with no visible content and a horde of scripts which are now busy XHR'ing a dozen different servers for tens of megabytes of pointless crap.

                        Microsoft (who invented XHR), Google (who popularized it), and designers (who jumped on it like flies on shit) largely ruined the web. RIAs and SPAs are horrible ideas.

                3. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Saw first hand the beebs response to the fastly failure and the cdn switcher isn’t a third party solution but rather internal dns that gets managed by change control. The Beeb has a mixture of in-house cdn running from 2 dcs and 2 separate cloud providers so has 3 way redundancy .

                  Anon for obvious reasons.

        2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

          It's really quite difficult and expensive to build your own multi-CDN system and, given, that configuration issues become increasingly likely to be the SPOF, even that won't always help as evinced by the occasional Google SNAFU: Google effectively does run multtiple CDNs.

          CDNs do take an enormous amount of risk out of the equation by filtering nearly all the aggressive traffic out there, and there is a lot of that!

          1. Ben Tasker

            > It's really quite difficult and expensive to build your own multi-CDN system

            It is - at least if you want a sufficiently functional one.

            Which is why, just as you'd buy turnkey CDN services, you'd buy a turnkey multi-CDN setup (Cedexis being the obvious example, but far from the only one).

            With a *good* CDN switcher, you essentially just have another CNAME in the DNS chain - all CDNs respond to the same host header, and your switcher just routes traffic to different CDNs based on observed/learned status as well as your preconfigured ruleset.

            The cost of those switchers is far, far less than the cost you'd incur self-implementing.

            There is, though, still a cost associated with that - at a certain point it becomes a business decision: do we spend $xxx, or accept that $edge_case might occur?

            > that configuration issues become increasingly likely to be the SPOF

            They are, but your CDN switching config shouldn't be changing anywhere nearly as regularly as your edge config (which itself probably isn't changing as regularly as the stack below it, etc).

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Serious Question: Does Cedexis become a SPOF?

              1. Ben Tasker

                It does, but a smaller and less complex one.

                Your CDN service has direct communication with end-users (because they connect in and request content) so:

                - If something goes wrong, users are directly (and immediately) impacted

                - It has to take a lot of load (obvs)

                - Lots of load increases the chance you'll get either cascade failures, or a thundering herd leading to cascade failures

                - The whole thing relies on TCP (HTTP/3/QUIC not withstanding)

                - You (and maybe even your sales dept) make config changes semi-regularly

                Things aren't quite the same for Cedexis:

                - Users query their resolver, there's widespread downstream caching, so load is much, much lower

                - That caching also means user visibility of issues is delayed (but, conversely, can be prolonged - it's a double edged sword)

                - There's no TCP overhead, everything's UDP (unless you've fucked up)

                - Config changes are likely to be quite rare

                There's obviously some common scope for screw-ups - software releases are a potential bugbear for each.

                But, CDNs also serve a wide variety of business - small file, VoD, linear video etc - it's all HTTP but optimal caching and delivery approaches (and often, desired reporting) differ greatly between them (even before we get onto built in optimisers and WAFs).

                CDN switchers on the other hand have one main focus - DNS. Whilst the status checkers etc might have more complexity, if you've got a sane ruleset (i.e. some default fallback) the worst case scenario of an issue there _should_ be that you fall through and send all your traffic to the default - still not great, but at least there's some service.

                So there's greater exposure to potential bugs on CDNs because they're more complex (software release improving performance for VoD customers just screwed your e-commerce site, sorry).

                There is also the matter of trust - are you better moving from trusting Cloudflare to some CDN switcher run by a single guy out of his garage? Hell no. You're going to want a reputable org with established support lines - just as you'd do due diligence on your CDN provider, you'd do it on your switcher provider.

                In the years I've been in CDN, I've only once seen a situation where the CDN switcher itself was an issue - https://www.bentasker.co.uk/blog/security/670-spamhaus-still-parties-like-it-s-1999 - even then it wasn't really an issue with the switcher so much as a 3rd party's understanding of modern flows.

            2. Joseba4242

              Good plan ... except all this does is to shift the SPOF from CDN to CDN selector so doesn't solve the problem.

              And it introduces significant additional complexity which experience shows is often the cause of problems. If you are serving a simple static page that's not an issue (but then you wouldn't be quoted here). Larger sites need to consider for example test coverage, troubleshooting, logging etc. which are all far more complex on multi-CDN.

              Thinking you can just re-point a CNAME is, well, wishful thinking.

              And that's not even touching on large services that need to do capacity planning with the CDNs and take selector decisions based on load.

              1. Ben Tasker

                > except all this does is to shift the SPOF from CDN to CDN selector so doesn't solve the problem.

                True, except we've just moved the SPOF from a complex TCP stack (your HTTP(s) service) receiving direct user-connections, to a much less complex UDP stack that benefits from widespread downstream caching.

                Is it still a SPOF? Yes. But it's also one that is much less complex, and less likely to go wrong.

                > Larger sites need to consider for example test coverage, troubleshooting, logging etc. which are all far more complex on multi-CDN.

                They are more complex, they are not "far" more complex.

                There might, of course, be an engineering cost in getting to the point that you can do multi-CDN properly, safely, but ultimately your tests should be CDN agnostic, and you should have well-defined troubleshooting workflows that minimise/mitigate the complexity there.

                Logging - if pulling logs from different sources is an issue for you, then it's not multi-CDN you've screwed up, it's your logging pipeline. If you can find a CDN provider that doesn't expose an API for you to pull logs via, then you've just found a CDN provider that you shouldn't be using.

                > Thinking you can just re-point a CNAME is, well, wishful thinking.

                Now you're misstating what I said

                'With a *good* CDN switcher, you essentially just have another CNAME in the DNS chain - all CDNs respond to the same host header, and your switcher just routes traffic to different CDNs based on observed/learned status as well as your preconfigured ruleset.'

                That's not saying "you can just repoint a CNAME".

                > And that's not even touching on large services that need to do capacity planning with the CDNs and take selector decisions based on load.

                That ability to configure that is built into pretty much every good CDN switcher.

                Yes, you need to do some planning with the CDNs themselves to discuss what load you're going to send, as well as getting details of how they expose metrics for your switcher to consume. If you're big enough to need a switcher though, then you're more than big enough to be having those conversations.

                This stuff _really_ isn't as complicated as you seem to think - it just needs a bit of planning and forethought.

        3. John Slater

          "edge cases". I see what you did there.

    4. ShadowSystems

      At Savvo...

      I find it amusingly ironic that ElReg has a user survey currently asking folks about why they may or may not use "the cloud" as of yet. It's stories such as this one that answer their questions far better than anything I could post.

      Why don't I use the cloud? Because the moment my data is in the hands of a third party, it's no longer my data.

      1. John Robson Silver badge

        Re: At Savvo...

        "Why don't I use the cloud? Because the moment my data is in the hands of a third party, it's no longer my data."

        So you build your own connections to every single user rather than relying on existing infrastructure? Wow, that must cost a pretty penny.

        Pretty sure that for most users of these services it is much cheaper, and probably better, than rolling their own. Building a CDN is hard, and having to do so for just one site is prohibitive.

        It means that a failure becomes really visible, but it probably makes those failures less likely than a whole bunch of disparate CDNs which aren't learning from each other's mistakes.

        1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

          Re: At Savvo...

          It's not really price that moves websites to CDNs but things like bandwidth and traffic filtering. Getting more bandwidth (and there are now attacks that have enough bandwidth to take out entire data centres) can be expensive but basically it's the filtering that brings the biggest returns.

        2. Old Used Programmer

          Re: At Savvo...

          For the only thing I do to which that might apply--a convention registration system--360 days out of the year, I am the only user. The other 5 days, it's physically moved to the convention hotel and entering new con members into the system is done by volunteers under my direction.

          So why would I put it in the cloud and risk having the system go down because the databases can't be accessed?

          I certainly won't claim to have eliminated all SPOFs, but I've gotten down to relatively few and for most of those I have spare equipment to swap in to cover.

          1. John Robson Silver badge
            FAIL

            Re: At Savvo...

            I only have one thing, and it's not really CDN worthy so CDNs are useless...

        3. Wayland

          Re: At Savvo...

          The Cloud can be handy for many reasons but mostly because you get excellent performance at a decent price. However you really can put in your own cables and run your own Internet servers from your own office. It's not difficult, you just buy a bit more bandwidth and a few extra servers. After that there is no difference between Cloud hosted or Office hosted servers, they are interchangeable.

          1. John Robson Silver badge

            Re: At Savvo...

            Except that you'd expect a "cloud hosted" (or a simple colo) server to be in a building with genuinely diverse power and data feeds. Not something you can necessarily install at every office, particularly if you don't own the office building.

      2. Charlie Clark Silver badge
        Stop

        Re: At Savvo...

        A CDN is not the same as putting your data into the cloud, it's really just a set of proxies.

      3. Roj Blake Silver badge

        Re: At Savvo...

        A wise man once said "there's no such thing as the cloud, it's just someone else's computer"

        And I reckon you use other people's computers all the time.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: At Savvo...

          If you buy something high end at CEX in a shit area it's almost certainly someone else's computer.

    5. Danny 14

      we ran our own web site, email, storage via sharepoint all onsite for many years, at least the 14 ive worked here. The management decided that we needed to shrink budgets so my dual internet, dual site, dual storage, dual stretch cluster was too expensive. Whilst dual redundant we only had power outages on both sites to consider - this happened once that I can remember - for loss of connectivity. Cloud DNS updated the records should we have an ISP failure and a lowish TTL meant this wasnt too much of an issue.

      Management wanted me to move to the cloud and we decided that 365 was the best option (since migrating onsite sharepoint to 365 was supposed to be painless. Covid hit, backs were patted as we were already cloudy (which meant nothing as we could already access all the resources externally anyway), however 365 started to have a few hiccups and outages over the year. Throttling reared its head a few times, other dropouts were noticed. Basically we have had more loss of access in the last 6 months at least than we did over the entire preceeding period of onsite.

      Cloud is definitely not more reliable.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Cloud is definitely not more reliable."

        And neither is on-premise. And I'm speaking as someone who has run their own kit (including in data centres) a lot over the years. What one hand giveth, and all that...

        Example: for hundreds of small(er) businesses with limited or no IT budget, or aging kit that keeps falling over, or where there is no-one IT-literate to watch over it, the cloud *may* be more reliable for them *for their needs*.

        Just because it isn't for *you* - even if you're doing very sensible stuff because you have knowledge and budget - doesn't make a hard and fast rule. As ever, quoting a particular specific to prove a general point is, well, a bit arse really? Also, if you suffered shrinking budgets then even your on-premise gear may have ended up less reliable over time...

        A/C because I'm not arguing this. Everyone's situation is different.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          “On-premise”?

          Premise is not the singular of premises.

          1. PaulVD

            Re: “On-premise”?

            That premises that the premise of your proposition is properly positioned on the premises where you work. Or something.

            1. Rich 11

              Re: “On-premise”?

              Thank you for the clarification. Can you also enlighten us regarding the supposition of suppositories in a supported system?

      2. Wayland

        Sometimes when you share you have the thing all to yourself. If you're the only one in the park then it's much bigger than your own back garden. However when everyone turns up to the park your back garden may offer more space.

        The thing with Covid is everyone started using the shared service. This may still have been a problem with Internet bandwidth using your on site servers but at least the servers would have been fine.

    6. Tessier-Ashpool

      It's not a good thing. The point is, a CDN is generally not a single point of failure, exactly the opposite in fact. But something has clearly gone terribly wrong in the management of the CDN.

    7. Tom Wood
      Coat

      Plausible deniability

      If your website goes down at the same time as a bunch of other websites, your IT department can say "ah well, happens to the best of us".

      If your website goes down but the rest of the internet is working, all fingers are pointing at your IT department.

      So clearly, from their point of view, cloud services are a good thing...

    8. Joseba4242

      Tell that to the likes of Mozilla who think that there's nothing wrong with defaulting to a single global DNS provider.

  3. KarMann Silver badge
    Flame

    Irony... or is it?

    This article posted at 10:46 UTC. At 10:44, Fastly:

    Identified - The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.

    Jun 8, 10:44 UTC

    Things do generally seem to be getting better now.

    1. KarMann Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Irony... or is it?

      Oh, and extra irony, the last XKCD I still had open in a tab before Fastly took it down along with it was The Cloud, after having followed a link from a Register comment earlier today.

    2. ShadowSystems

      At KarMann, re: getting better...

      For some odd reason I heard that in the voice of the Monty Python old man being dumped in the dead-folks cart crying out weakly "I'm getting better! I think I'll go for walkies!"

      I expected to hear a stern "No you're not, you'll be stone dead soon."

      =-D

  4. Boothy

    I noticed github and xkcd were having issues earlier, guess this was it.

    Those two, at least for myself, seem to be back again now.

    There seems to be too many sites with a dependency on a single, apparently not resilient, service!

    1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

      Just one dependency? ;-)

  5. h3nb45h3r

    They spelt DNS wrong...

  6. PaulR79

    What causes this?

    How many more times are we going to see one major CDN issue take out a considerably large chunk of websites? Is it purely that it saves money and "only happens now and again" to justify it or is there no way to have two of these things?

    I look at the Fastly status page and it says this which does not inspire confidence.

    "Fastly’s network has built-in redundancies and automatic failover routing to ensure optimal performance and uptime. But when a network issue does arise, we think our customers deserve clear, transparent communication so they can maintain trust in our service and our team."

    What happened with the failover? Backup services? I know nothing of any of this so I know I'm being overly simple. Anyone care to educate me?

    1. Natalie Gritpants Jr

      Re: What causes this?

      The clue is in the acronym: content denial network

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What causes this?

      The backup is connected to that power socket next to the cleaner's store room...

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What causes this?

      Well, if they are as 'transparent' as they say they are, maybe wait until we get a post-mortem rather than randomly wonder about it? For all we know their backup and failover systems may have worked brilliantly the last 99 out of 100 times they were needed and we just never knew because they just worked, but just didn't this one time (although if failover had been needed that often maybe something is wrong, but you get my point).

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fastly

    .........................disappearing?

    1. Rufus McDufus

      Re: Fastly

      Not-so-Fastly

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Fastly

        I'd like to think that "Fastly" fell over because they're one of those annoying intertube companies with an irritatingly stupid name. Can it be MailChump [sic] and SurlyMonkey [sic] next, please?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    implications and questions

    - all eggs in one basket?

    - did they get hacked?

    - related to FBI action?

    - was it Russians, Chinese, Iranians, or North Korea? Or just a mouse that chewed through a cable?

    bbc reported amazon is down. I then shuddered as my world suddenly collapsed. What am I to do? Gov.uk can be down, and all data spilled, but AMAZON?! We're doomed!

    1. Peter Mount
      Facepalm

      Re: implications and questions

      That was the weird part, amazon's own site lost their images which made me thing they were down.

      Why would they use a 3rd party CDN?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: implications and questions

        the 503 URL's I saw had aws in the mix.

        So my guess is that the CDN either took down a chunk of aws or more likely an aws failure cascaded and brought down the CDN

      2. John Sager

        Re: implications and questions

        I got that about a week ago. I thought it was my own network because I've been experimenting with nftables (definitely nicer than iptables but doesn't support as many targets). But it turned out to be external.

        1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge
          Pint

          Re: I thought it was my own network...

          John,

          Next time you're going to do some tinkering, can you let us know please?

          Preferably during (see icon) hours, and when the weather is nice enough to sit outside.

    2. Ol'Peculier

      Re: implications and questions

      Amazon seemed down to me for a short period. That one I don't get, as they happily sell access to their own CDN, so why don't they themselves us it?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Black Helicopters

        Re: implications and questions

        "That one I don't get, as they happily sell access to their own CDN, so why don't they themselves us it?"

        Maybe they're actually white-labelling Fastly's services. In fact maybe AWS in its entirety is done the same way :)

        1. monty75

          Re: implications and questions

          Second appearance in this comment thread https://xkcd.com/908/

  9. MrElmo

    Guru Meditation

    As great as the Amiga line of computers were, I'm not sure they should be hosting large swaths of the Internet in 2021!

    1. Peter X
      Happy

      Re: Guru Meditation

      I *do* love that there are now considerably more people than ever used an Amiga now seeing this message, and presumably wondering "Guru Meditation? What?!"

      This is a good thing. It makes me happy! :D

      1. beerfuelled

        Re: Guru Meditation

        Although it's really bugging me that it was misspelled as "Guru Mediation" on the Fastly page, even though it is correctly spelled "Guru Meditation" in the Varnish Cache source, and always has been.

        Have Fastly messed up the spelling in their Varnish config?

        1. jonathan keith

          Re: Guru Meditation

          Might "Guru Meditation" be protected by copyright?

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: Guru Meditation

            Might "Guru Meditation" be protected by autocorrect? (and ignorance, apathy and illiteracy?)

    2. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Guru Meditation

      OS 3.2 has just been released, maybe the sites went down while they were updating Workbench.

  10. mark l 2 Silver badge

    I noticed problems on both Amazon and Ebay this morning. Both the sites were loading but several images were missing, So i assume its connected to the Fastly outage.

    1. lglethal Silver badge
      Trollface

      BOFH response

      So i assume its connected to the Fastly outage.

      Hmmm. So this might be a good time to do that emergency maintenance we've been putting off and which will take down the network for a bit.

      "Oh Yes, yes I'm sorry the network has dropped off at the moment. Yes it's due to this Fastly outage. Yeah it took down most of the internet and yeah we got hit as well. Dont worry I'm sure it will be up again soon..."

  11. katrinab Silver badge
    Coat

    Surely xkcd 908 is the correct link

    https://xkcd.com/908/

    Seems someone tripped on the network cable ...

  12. Ozumo

    I expect we'll get a "Who,me?" in due course.

    1. veti Silver badge

      About 20 years, seems to be the average wait for those.

  13. LisaJK

    Everything kept working in Munich

    I started to notice issues this morning, then realised I was using a VPN with presence in the UK.

    When I disconnected from the VPN to use the direct local ISP connection in Munich, Germany, everything worked and continued to work all morning.

    I checked all the sites reported, like FB, Independent, Guardian, NY Times, etc. and all their sites were up.

    Was this a case of inflated ego little British journos confusing UK for the World, with their reports of global outage???

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: confusing UK for the World

      Kickstarter was down here in Northern Europe, and we can only thank the heavens that FB, Independent, Guardian, NY Times, were off line. So obvs. I didn't check any of them.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Everything kept working in Munich

      JetBlue was down. So global-ish.

  14. IanD

    It feels better now ...

    ‘So far so good’ says Dido Harding, on first day as head of global internet content delivery network provider.

    1. PTW
      Pint

      Re: It feels better now ...

      Rather that than let her anywhere near the NHS! Bit of downtime never hurt anyone, although you'd think it was life threatening they way the yoof carry on. Anyway, have a beer, you made me chuckle

    2. Sam Therapy

      Re: It feels better now ...

      I thought it was Grayling but there you go.

  15. fredesmite2
    Mushroom

    Did they pay $5M too ?

    randomware ?

    "Mr Putin Strongly denied it .. and I believe him "

    Twice Impeached Bone-Spurs

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "identified and a fix is being implemented."

    Translation: We made a change during the night in the US and thought no-one would notice if we f**ked it up. Turns out it wasn't the night in other places in the world, who knew?

    I bet their were some handsomely paid CIOs shopping for new underwear today...

  17. Roger Kynaston
    Trollface

    Changing times

    I put a notice on the street whatsupdoc group and the first comments were that the usual suspects (China and Russia) must be attacking us!

    Of course we all know that it was because Bill Gates activated the chips in our vaccines thus causing an overload to the edge servers!

    1. First Light

      Re: Changing times

      I was able to change the mind of someone who was starting to believe that ludicrous idea by pointing out that there isn't enough bandwidth or tech infrastructure in the world to transmit, store and manage all whatever data would be generated.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Changing times

        I'm glad you found one of them has some mental activity going on. Whenever I've tried such logic on people who believe in that or similarly bizarre theories, electrical or technical limitations are always dismissed. Either the conspirators are much smarter than me and know how to do impossible things or I'm just stupid and can't realize that technical things are much better than I thought they were.

  18. Mister Dubious
    Headmaster

    Which is In, which Out?

    "... Fastly, an edge-centric cloud computing specialist ..."

    "Edge-centric?" Isn't that a moronoxy?

    1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

      Re: Which is In, which Out?

      Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

      Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

    2. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

      Re: Which is In, which Out?

      "edge-centric"

      Was planning to highlight exactly this. But I had a feeling I wouldn't be the only one.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is Fastly by any chance related to Ruptly, the RT subsidary?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      or Gladly (my cross-eyed bear). Baby Grumpling was always destined to have a career as a BOFH.

  20. xyz Silver badge

    I do hope some sales slinger was

    Giving a presentation on the benefits of the cloud to a really, really big client when.... Eek!

  21. Franco

    Huh, didn't know Fastly used 123-reg for their DNS.....

  22. Sam Therapy
    Unhappy

    Well well, welly well...

    I did mention this in a post hours ago but none of you buggers upvoted it so arse to the lot of ye.

    Any road up...

    Eggs in one basket = recipe for disaster. Or, of course, an omelette.

  23. jake Silver badge

    Internet NOT down.

    Hypponen wrote of the outage. "Basically, internet is down."

    No. A few little subsets of the Internet were down. The Internet as a whole would remain unaffected if Fastly permanently went TITSUP (Total Inability To Supply Usual Procedures).

  24. TechHeadToo

    Only £200 Million Revenue?

    The only thing I'm surprised about - that low revenue figure.

    "If you want a more reliable service, you'll have to pay a bit more....."

    "about x10 more"

    - and scammers think their ransomware is able to present a threat...

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