The world’s biggest websites went down because of a CDN outage

On June 6, a major outage affected several major-league players’ websites, including Amazon, Twitch, Pinterest, Stack Overflow, GitHub, and other services. The problem was caused by a failure at Fastly, a popular CDN provider.

The idea behind a CDN is to ensure the best possible website load times to make content accessible equally fast from any part of the world. To accomplish that, CDNs work like a smart layer between a website and its visitors. However, there’s also a weakness in this strength: by going down, Fastly completely blocked those websites for about an hour.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a CDN service go down. In July 2020, Cloudflare, another big-name CDN player, experienced an outage and took thousands of websites and online services with it.

This is one of the reasons why we at Uploadcare leverage three CDNs simultaneously. If there’s an issue with any one of them, the two others step in and provide your users with the best page loading times and help your website run smoothly regardless of traffic surges.

Suggested posts for further reading: 7 reasons why you should use a CDN for your images.