Report: A Single Fastly Customer Innocently Triggered ‘Bug’ That Led to Internet Meltdown

Many high-profile websites were taken down by an outage at the cloud-computing company Fastly this week. Now it’s reported that the bug was triggered when a single Fastly customer innocently changed their settings, triggering a total systems failure.

Breitbart News recently reported that on Tuesday morning, multiple popular internet websites including Amazon, Reddit, Twitch, Pinterest, and more went offline due to a major outage at a service called Fastly. CNET reports that at around 2:58 a.m. PT, Fastly noted on its status update page that the service was experiencing issues, stating: “we’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN [content delivery network] services.”

Now, BBC News is reporting that the bug in Fastly’s system was caused by one user changing their settings. The outage raised questions about relying on a small handful of companies to run the infrastructure that keeps many major internet websites operational.

Fastly senior engineering executive Nick Rockwell stated: “This outage was broad and severe — and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.”

The company operates servers at strategic points around the world to help customers move and store content closer to end-users. But a customer changed their settings and exposed a bug in a software update issued to customers in mid-May causing “85% of our network to return errors,” the company said.

Engineers worked out the cause of the problem 40 minutes after multiple websites went offline. “Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal,” Fastly said. The company has since deployed a bug fix across its network and promised a “post mortem of the processes and practices we followed during this incident” and to “figure out why we didn’t detect the bug during our software quality assurance and testing processes.”

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com