"Global Major Website Access Outage... Risk of Recurrence Remains"

[Asia Economy Reporter Yujin Cho] Major global media outlets, social media platforms, and UK government websites experienced a widespread outage but were restored to normal operation after about an hour, bringing the incident to a close. However, concerns remain that such a large-scale access disruption could recur at any time.

On the 8th (local time), major global media including CNN, The New York Times, Financial Times, and BBC were simultaneously inaccessible for a period. Thousands of websites were affected, including the world's largest e-commerce company Amazon, online community Reddit, US electronic payment company PayPal, and UK government websites.

Bloomberg reported that the cause of these websites going down was a technical failure at the cloud service provider Fastly. Fastly provides content delivery network (CDN) services to these websites, operating servers that store caches around the world to enable internet users to access content more quickly.

These servers function as a kind of logistics center that stores and delivers data. If a technical failure occurs on one server, major websites in various countries using it can be paralyzed simultaneously. Especially, since there are only a few CDN service providers like Fastly worldwide, concerns have been raised that if one of them encounters a problem, the impact could be widespread.

The report evaluated that this incident revealed how vulnerable even large corporations are in a digitalized world. Recently, the exponential increase in digital content volume is also a risk factor. According to IDC, the amount of digital content expected to be created in the next three years will exceed the total accumulated over the past 30 years.

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of web performance monitoring company Catchpoint, said, "Server capacity or performance issues can be resolved but are not perfect," and pointed out, "The Fastly incident could happen again at any time."

After service normalization on the day, Fastly stated, "There is no evidence that hackers were involved in this outage." However, Bloomberg noted that such widespread website outages are often the result of hacking. In 2016, internet hosting company Dyn suffered a large-scale DDoS hacking attack, paralyzing about half of major US websites simultaneously. At that time, well-known websites such as Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, as well as major media outlets including CNN and The New York Times were affected.