On Tuesday 8 June there was a sensational blackout on the internet all over the world. Dozens of very important sites belonging to different spheres were involved. The list includes public institutions, such as the British government, sites of newspapers particularly well-known (including New York Times, Financial Times, Spectator, Corriere della Sera, Le Monde e Guardian), television networks (as the CNN), web giants active in various fields (Reddit, Twitch, Spotify) and even his majesty Amazon.
But what exactly happened? It's still early to say: the only certainty is that it causes the malfunction it was not a hacking attack. It was rather about a technical fault, almost certainly caused by Cdn Fastly, a sort of telematic infrastructure that serves all the sites that have been out of service for a few hours.
The company, which is based in San Francisco and has a turnover of 291 million dollars (2020 data), immediately wrote on its website that it "has identified the problem" and is working to find a remedy. Afterwards, the situation gradually returned to normal.
To have a more precise idea of what happened, you need to know what the cdn. The English acronym stands for Content Delivery Network o Content Distribution Network, i.e. content distribution networks: these are computer systems connected via the web that collaborate in a transparent way to disseminate content (especially multimedia content with large bandwidths) and deliver audio and video streaming services.
This network distributed on the computers of the main providers allows content to be kept in the cache memory, which in this way can be viewed more quickly by users browsing the sites involved in the network.
