By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
There was global internet shutdown for about an hour on Tuesday that might have made Nigerians suspect that Muhammadu Buhari has colluded with China to build an internet firewall in Nigeria because of his passion to quench free speech.
Even though he has denied the report of an internet firewall, Nigerians do not trust their president. Nor his lying ministers. Yet, Buhari has no hand in this one.
CNN reports that countless websites and apps around the world went down for about an hour Tuesday after Fastly, a major content delivery network, reported a widespread failure.
Fastly supports news sites and apps like CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times and many others. It also provides content delivery for Twitch, Pinterest, HBO Max, Hulu, Reddit, Spotify (SPOT) and other services.
Other major internet platforms and sites including Amazon, Target, and the UK government website – Gov.uk – were affected.
The problem was not caused by hackers (the usual suspects being Russians or ransomeware hackers backed by Russians) whose attack last month shutdown the East Coast pipeline in the United States owned by Colonial Oil.
To resume operations, Colonial Oil had to pay Darkside the hackers about $2.3 million ransom in Bitcoins. But the transaction was secretly monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The Justice Department announced on Tuesday it has seized the ransom paid to individuals in the criminal hacking group.
Server configuration malfunction
CNN explains that the global internet shutdown was caused by an outage at Fastly (FSLY), a cloud service provider. The company said on its service status website (which was working) Tuesday morning it had identified the problem and fixed the issue.
Service for sites and apps started to be restored a little after 7am ET (12pm Nigerian time), although Fastly said some customers may experience longer load times as a residual effect of the outage.
The outage affected dozens of countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia, as well as South Africa.
Fastly said it had identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across its servers around the world. The company has disabled that configuration.
Essentially, Fastly took down its own network with a bad software update – a rare but not unheard of goof that has temporarily brought down parts of even larger online platforms, including Google and Amazon, in the past.
What is Fastly?
Per CNN, Fastly helps improve load times for websites and provides other services to internet sites, apps and platforms – including a large global server network designed to smooth out traffic overloads that can bring down websites, such as a denial-of-service attack.
But because Fastly provides a layer of support between internet companies and customers trying to access news sites, social media and other online platforms, when it goes down, access to those services can be blocked entirely.
When Fastly went down, it went down hard: Three-quarters of the traffic coming from Fastly disappeared at around 5:49am ET, according to Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik, a cloud company that provides large companies with internet transmission records.
Traffic began returning at about 6:39 am ET.
Why Fastly’s outage took the internet down
Companies that operate on the internet can switch content delivery networks – and some appeared able to bypass Fastly’s outage Tuesday morning. But that’s not always an easy or quick proposition.
Major website and app outages happen from time to time and typically don’t last long – internet service providers, content delivery networks and other hosting services are built with multiple redundancies and a global network of backup servers designed to reduce disruptions when things go haywire.
No error-free internet
CNN recalls that in August 2020, CenturyLink, an internet service provider that is supposed to keep websites up and running, was down itself for the better part of a day.
That meant Cloudflare, Hulu, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Feedly, Discord, and dozens of other services reported connectivity problems. When Cloudflare – a content delivery network like Fastly – went down, it took dozens of website and online services along with it.
“There is no error-free internet, so the measure of success is how quickly a major internet firm like Fastly can recover from a rare outage like this,” Madory said. “In this case, it was under an hour.”
