Fast.ly broke the Internet for an hour this morning
For roughly an hour this morning—6 am to 7 am EDT, give or take a few minutes—enormous swathes of the Internet were down or interestingly broken. Sites taken down included CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, PayPal, and Spotify, among many more—including The Verge, which resorted to reporting via Google Docs during the duration of the outage.
The underlying problem was an outage at Fastly, one of the world's largest Content Delivery Network providers—the entire service went down due to a misconfiguration which it had deployed to all of its Points Of Presence (POPs) globally. As a result, sites using Fastly for content delivery came up with various errors dependent on the local site configuration. Some sites delivered relatively uninformative, plain HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable) pages, while others returned errors such as "Fastly error: unknown domain."
