The U.S. government recovered millions of dollars in Bitcoin paid by Colonial Pipeline to ransomware hackers who locked up its computer system last month.As a content-delivery network, Fastly provides vital but behind-the-scenes cloud-computing “edge servers” to many of the web’s popular sites.
The impact of Fastly’s trouble highlights the relative fragility of the internet’s current architecture given its heavy reliance on Big Tech companies — such as Amazon’s AWS cloud services — as opposed to a more decentralized model. “Even the biggest and most sophisticated companies experience outages. But they can also recover fairly quickly,” said Madory.
When the outage hit, some visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.” Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message while visits to the New York Times and the British government’s gov.uk site returned an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message, along with the line “Varnish cache server,” which is a technology that Fastly is built on.