Outage exposes weakness
Fastly’s internet outage shows why we need a WOF for technology, argues David Court.
Something weird happened on Wednesday night. At 10pm, I was busy doing what I usually do at that time of night: impressing my partner by skilfully toothbrushing with one hand, while scrolling through Twitter on my iphone with my other, when I discovered something bigwas happening. The web was down.
CNN, The Guardian, Amazon, Instagram, and even the United Kingdom Government’s website (to name a few) were all victims of the outage.
Panic started to sink in as I stood over my bathroom sink. This was serious, I thought.
I decisively cut my two-minute brush cycle short and spent the next half an hour doomscrolling my way through my Twitter feed. I foundmultiple level-headed journalists had resorted to doing their job, reporting the news about the web outage, via long Twitter threads.
One publication even came up with the genius idea of sharing an open Google Doc and covered the breaking story about the breaking internet, that way.
Was this a cyber attack? Could state-sponsored hackers from Russia, North Korea, or China be responsible for this?
No. The problem, I soon found out, was due to a fault at a CDN (Content Deliverynetwork) company called Fastly.
Panic over.
What went wrong is still a bit of mystery, with Fastly keeping whatever the exact problem was closely guarded.
It only offered a quick Tweet’s worth of information on the issue: ‘‘We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPS globally and have disabled that configuration.’’
Helpful.
Thankfully, the technical problemwas resolved in about an hour, and there was no lasting damage.
But the emotional fallout from the outage is, potentially, much bigger. The outage exposed how fragile the current infrastructure is. What’s really surprising is that these sort of outages don’t happen more.
The lesson that this episode taught us is a familiar one. As more of our livesmove online (as they should), we hand over ‘‘more’’ responsibility to tech companies that enjoy very little regulation over how they operate.
Will Fastly face repercussions for causing thisweb outage? I doubt it. Fastly is, instead, enjoying a share price bump of about 13 per cent (at the time of writing) thanks to all of the free publicity ‘‘a service configuration that triggered disruptions across [its] POPS’’ won.
It’s almost depressing. Thankfully, there are signs that things are slowly changing as governments (not ours) are beginning to assert control over technology companies.
I’m referring to two stories in particular. First, the effort by the G7 to impose a tax of ‘‘at least 15 per cent’’ on big tech. Finally ...
Second, and more significantly, the news that the United States Senate approved a bill titled the US Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), designed to increase US competitiveness with China. The bill will see billions of dollars invested into emerging Us-based technology like artificial intelligence, semiconductor manufacturing, and quantum computing.
This week’sminorweb blip demonstrated how societies rely on strong tech infrastructures to operate properly.
And as a result, I think there’s a strong argument for closer regulation. Making key companies, and employees at all levels, perform the technology equivalent of awarrant of Fitness isn’t the worst idea in the world.
This isn’t a problem that’s going away on its own.