8th June - When the Lights went Out : Unexpected internet outage
Digital publishers across the globe had to face a 50 minute long downtime on their websites and apps. The temporary outage was caused due to a glitch in the cloud computing service provider - Fastly. The unpredictable event caused major traffic fluctuations for several brands. Bigger media houses like The New York Times, The Guardian and CNN were also impacted by it. Our team at Quintype ensured that our clients didn’t have to experience the adverse effects of an unpredicted downtime. How did we do it? Read the blog to find out!
Why was there an internet outage today?
A cluster of websites and apps across the globe went down on June 8, after a major content delivery network - Fastly suffered a widespread failure. Fastly’s service configuration triggered disruptions across it’s servers. Now, the configuration has been disabled.
Fastly has helped improve loading time for websites and it also provides services to internet sites, apps and other platforms. They’re popular among media sites. As it acts as a layer of support between digital brands and netizens, when it experiences downtime, access to all those services get blocked immediately.
How did we protect our clients?
Let's face it; all CDNs have had service disruption over a period of time, some globally and some based on geographical region. At Quintype we saw this as a cause of concern for our clients and started implementing what we call CDN HOT SWITCH. A CDN, in simple terms, is a service that allows popular websites to keep copies of their pages closer to their customers.
Quintype’s CDN Hot Switch (which is in its alpha phase) protected our clients so that they didn’t have to face prolonged downtime. In the news industry, any downtime can significantly impact your traffic and credibility, this is why our team has been dedicated to ensure that our enterprise clientele has a safety net by having two CDNs, acting as backup for each-other.
As soon as the service disruption was detected by our alerting system on FASTLY CDN, we switched over to Cloudflare CDN and thereby avoided prolonged downtimes.
This enabled us to cut short the downtime considerably as compared to other global news and media sites.
We stay focused on our customer's success as the only metric of our success.
To know about how we can help you with your website - get in touch with us here.