A single Fastly customer changing their settings triggered the giant internet outage that hit Reddit, Spotify, and the White House's site
- Large chunks of the internet went down Tuesday morning, including Reddit, Spotify, and the White House's site.
- The problem was caused by Fastly, a content-delivery network used by many sites.
- Fastly said the outage was due to a bug triggered by a single customer updating their settings.
A huge outage hit numerous parts of the internet for an hour on Tuesday morning, with major sites including Reddit, Spotify, The New York Times, and the White House going offline.
At the root of the problem was Fastly, a popular content-delivery network (CDN). CDNs usually help websites load faster, but CDN problems can take out parts of the internet.
In a blog posted on Wednesday, Fastly's Senior Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure Nick Rockwell explained what had triggered the outage - it was one unnamed customer changing their settings.
"On May 12, we began a software deployment that introduced a bug that could be triggered by a specific customer configuration under specific circumstances," Rockwell said.
"Early June 8, a customer pushed a valid configuration change that included the specific circumstances that triggered the bug, which caused 85% of our network to return errors," he said, adding that Fastly had rolled out a permanent fix for the bug.
"Even though there were specific conditions that triggered this outage, we should have anticipated it," Rockwell said.
"We apologize to our customers and those who rely on them for the outage and sincerely thank the community for its support."