Massive morning internet outage caused more fear than usual in the summer of ransomware

In the era of cyber attacks and the summer of ransomware, an internet outage this morning caused more anxiety than usual..

Dozens of websites went down briefly around the globe Tuesday, including CNN, The New York Times and Britain’s government home page, after an outage at the cloud computing service Fastly, illustrating how vital a small number of behind-the-scenes companies have become to running the internet.

The sites that could not be reached also included some Amazon pages, the Financial Times, Reddit, Twitch and The Guardian.

San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 6 a.m. Eastern. About an hour later, the company said: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied.” Most of the sites soon appeared to be back online.

The company said in an emailed statement that it was a “technical issue” and “not related to a cyber attack.”

As quickly a many news stations posted stories about the outage, the sites were back up and working properly..

But it remains a strange cloud over the day.. this idea that our net world could be snatched in an instant from under our feet.

This is how the AFP  summarized the events:

Tue, June 8, 2021, 7:43 AM·

Major media and government websites, including the White House, New York Times, Reddit and Amazon were temporarily down on Tuesday after being hit by a global outage blamed on a glitch from cloud computing services provider Fastly.

The widespread outages around 1000 GMT also hit the UK government website, CNN and the BBC before resuming services more than an hour later.

"Error 503 Service Unavailable" and "connection failure" messages appeared on several websites, later blamed on a problem at San Francisco-based firm Fastly, which scrambled to restore sites.

Everything now back to normal.

The normal that feels dreadful, in a sense..

The kind of normal that waits for the next shoe to drop.