March 29, 2024

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U.S. firm Fastly says software bug caused sites to go dark in global web outage

June 9 (UPI) — A software bug is said to be the cause of a major global Internet outage that temporarily took down major news, entertainment and retail websites and apps.

The outage occurred Tuesday morning due to a failure at Fastly, a cloud-based network that provides web support to a number of major content providers.

The failure affected news outlets including The New York Times and CNN and retailers like Amazon and Target. Entertainment sites including HBO Max and Hulu also saw outages.

California-based Fastly said the bug, which was included in a software update in May, was activated when a customer changed a setting. The company is unsure why the bug wasn’t detected during testing prior to the outage.

“We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change,” Nick Rockwell, Fastly senior vice president of engineering and infrastructure, wrote in a blog post late Tuesday.

“Even though there were specific conditions that triggered this outage, we should have anticipated it.”

Rockwell said the outage was “broad and severe,” but noted that the problem was identified and fixed after 49 minutes.

The British government’s website, gov.uk, was also affected by the outage Tuesday.

Because Fastly is a support network that helps with web speeds and high-traffic issues, any outage at the source can impact its client sites.