He quickly says that the internet outage was caused by a customer changing the setting: NPR

Fastly premieres Tuesday in Los Angeles. Dozens of websites were briefly down around the world on Tuesday, including CNN, The New York Times and the British government’s homepage, after the Fastly cloud service outage.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AFP

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Marcio Jose Sanchez/AFP

Fastly premieres Tuesday in Los Angeles. Dozens of websites were briefly down around the world on Tuesday, including CNN, The New York Times and the British government’s homepage, after the Fastly cloud service outage.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AFP

LONDON – The company soon suffered a major outage that caused many of the world’s best websites to stop working briefly this week, and it blamed the problem on a software bug that arose when a customer changed the setting.

The Fastly . problem It means netizens were unable to connect to a handful of popular sites early Tuesday including The New York Times, The Guardian, Twitch, Reddit and the UK government’s homepage.

“We experienced a global outage due to an undetected software bug that appeared on June 8 when it was triggered by changing a valid client configuration,” Nick Rockwell, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure at Fastly, He said in a blog post late on Tuesday.

He said the outage was “widespread and severe” but the company quickly identified, isolated and disabled the problem, and after 49 minutes, most of its network was back up and running. The bug was included in a software update rolled out in May and Rockwell said the company is trying to figure out why it wasn’t detected during testing.

“Although there were specific circumstances that caused this outage, we had to anticipate it,” said Rockwell.

San Francisco-based Fastly provides a so-called Content Delivery Network — an arrangement that allows customer websites to store data such as photos and videos on different mirror servers across 26 countries. Keeping data closer to users means that it appears faster.

but the The incident was highlighted To what extent the bulk of the global internet relies on a handful of behind-the-scenes companies like Fastly that provide critical infrastructure, this has amplified concerns about their vulnerability to the most serious disruption.