Tons of websites down?

[Ian]

Has anyone else noticed that there are a TON of websites down this morning? It's like someone pulled a plug on AWS or some other backend that powers everything. So many sites are down.

Maybe half of all large websites I've tried are having some problems, often things like Varnish cache errors.

 

[Ian]

WOW, everything seems to be down. Newspaper sites, shops, etc... there must be a big CDN (content delivery network) having problems. Surprised there isn't a way to bypass this in cases like this. It all seems to be related to varnish cache errors.

 

[V_R]

Cloudflare?

I've been too busy working to notice, as long as I have network access I'm happy at the moment!

 

[muckshifter]

All the websights I visit are up.

 

[V_R]

BBC News - Websites begin to work again after major breakage

Websites begin to work again after major breakage

Cloud computing provider Fastly, which was behind the problems, said it was implementing a fix.

www.bbc.co.uk

Something to do with fastly apparently...

 

[Ian]

Yep that's the one - soooooo many places were down this morning, or working incorrectly.

Even StackExchange was down at one point, so that's a whole lot of dev's sitting on their hands .

 

[nivrip]

I didn't notice any problems at all - probably because I was out but I do find it very worrying that a glitch in one company in California, Fastly, could cause so much world wide chaos. Even Gov.uk was out of action. How can governments around the world not have any back up systems to forestall this problem?

It's reckoned that online companies lost about £1 billion in sales in the time that the shutdown occurred (although most of that would be made up when back online).

Just imagine what will happen if cyberwarfare really took off.

 

[Ian]

Yeah I'm surprised too! I'd have thought that sites like gov.uk would have a killswitch, so that it bypasses cloud CDNs if there is a problem. I guess they'll be coding that in right now .