Fastly: a reminder that everyone relying on the internet is vulnerable

On Tuesday morning GMT, for around an hour, a large number of websites from all corners of the internet were unavailable to many trying to access them.  From the Guardian to Hulu in places all over the world, error messages were displayed.  The reason - the content delivery network service ("CDN") Fastly was experiencing issues. 

As users, we don't notice CDNs.  That is, until they fail. 

CDNs work by a series of servers as close to the end user as possible.  When someone loads a webpage data only needs to be fetched from that server instead of the original.  This greatly speeds up the internet experience. 

However, the flipside to this technological advancement is that when a CDN experiences issues, websites can go down.  Access does not just get slower, but can be completely prevented.  As happened Tuesday, all an end user might see is an error message.

Tuesday's outage was fixed quickly.  Most websites were accessible again within the hour.  Therefore, losses flowing from Fastly's issues were likely minimal.  However, that will not always be the case.  One can only imagine, for example, if a CDN is seriously attacked and the technology is unable to be reimplemented quickly, what that could mean for hundreds, if not thousands of businesses.  Losses, and therefore potential damages claims will be inevitable. 

In a world where we are becoming increasingly dependent on the internet to do business, Tuesday's events serve as a stark reminder that technology must never be taken for granted.  Even the biggest cloud providers, and therefore anyone that is reliant on those providers, is vulnerable.  Had the outage been longer the law suits would undoubtedly be numerous.