Fastly says it is ‘truly sorry for the impact’ to its customers

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Updated on Sep 25, 2024

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Fastly in a blogpost accepted the 'outage was broad and severe'.
Some major websites including The Guardian, The Financial Times and The New York Times were affected.
Fastly restored 95% of the services within 49 minutes and is fast deploying a fix across its network.

Fastly Inc.’s (NYSE: FSLY) Senior Vice President Nick Rockwell shared a blog post on the company’s website to discuss the major global internet outage that affected many websites on Tuesday.

Some of the major high traffic websites including The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Times, Britain’s government homepage, Twitch, Reddit and Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) that run on the cloud infrastructure of Fastly were down. Considering the severity of the impact on customers, Rockwell said:

“This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.”

Shares of Fastly jumped 14% yesterday with investors shrugging off the global outage. The stock is down 0.5% today in the afternoon trading and down around 35% year-to-date.

The cause and timeline of the outage

The company pinpointed the cause of the outage to a software bug that was introduced by a May 12 software deployment and could be triggered by particular customer settings.

On June 8, one of the customers pushed those particular settings that triggered the bug and caused a global outage. According to the timeline shared in the blog post, the company was able to detect the disruption within a minute and was also able to restore 95% of the services by 1036 GMT, which was within 49 minutes of the onset of disruption.

After pushing the immediate fix, the company worked on the permanent fix and began deploying it by 1725 GMT.

Next Steps for the company

The company expects to deploy the bug fix across its network quickly and conduct a post mortem of the processes while trying to figure out the reasons for not being able to detect the bug during quality assurance and testing phases.

The blogpost, in conclusion, mentioned:

“Even though there were specific conditions that triggered this outage, we should have anticipated it. We provide mission critical services, and we treat any action that can cause service issues with the utmost sensitivity and priority.”