CDN glitch halts the world’s media; a warning bell for our over-reliance on cloud servers.

On June 8th, several websites including Amazon, Reddit, BBC, New York Times, Guardian, Financial Times, and Reddit became unavailable. All users could see was a ‘503 error’, meaning the browser was not able to access the server. Fastly, a cloud services platform, says the internet outage affected websites across 80 service locations in the Asia-Pacific, North America, South America, South Africa, India and Europe.

Content delivery networks, or CDNs, are used by companies that run global networks of servers. CDNs help improve performance by caching data as close to the end-user as possible so that web pages load quicker as the data doesn’t need to be fetched from the original server. Many platforms today keep their geographically relevant data closer to where it is consumed for this very reason. Today, large web traffic passes through CDNs.

Well, it is no wonder that in today’s world, everything is heavily cloud-dependent, the reason being that more and more people are shifting from conventional viewing to internet-based. People are increasingly moving from text to video and from recorded to live and interactive viewing and it has put pressure on network infrastructures of service providers, media houses and online businesses. In this environment, something devastating like a CDN glitch would not only be frustrating to us not being able to follow our “Netflix and chill” routine but also could also be disastrous to people, or the government, whose jobs are profoundly dependent on these servers.

This is not the first instance of CDNs causing many websites to go down. In 2020, issues with another CDN provider, Cloudflare, hit Discord, Shopify and few companies. These outages are an example of the centralisation of the internet in the hands of few. This market is relatively small and each company serves a large number of clients. This means that a technical hiccup in a single company can have huge ramifications. This in turn--raises major questions about the dangers of power consolidation in the cloud market & the unquestioned influence these often-invisible actors have over access to information.

Some suggest, having real-time monitoring capability in-built within the CDN ecosystem, that predicts and prepares for any service issues enabling proactive resolution. This coupled with an integrated security capability can help detect malicious attacks early. This blended approach of leveraging software development and deployment, capacity management and scaling, and cyber resilience will help prepare both, the service providers and the media houses, for better levels of fault handling.

But, until some alternate plan is implemented, our over-reliance on these cloud servers lands us well inside the risk of terrifying things such as data loss, privacy intrusion and so forth.