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Earlier this morning, many businesses were experiencing an unexpected period of downtime, including leading websites such as Amazon, Reddit and the UK government website.
Initial reports suggest that cloud computing provider Fastly, which infrastructure underpins many popular websites, was behind the outage experienced across many parts of Europe and the US. Other major sites affected included CNN, the New York Times and streaming services Twitch and Hulu.
What is downtime?
This is when a website or web service is not functioning properly and therefore end users are unlikely to complete a task such as visiting a particular web page. Most companies strive for near to zero downtime, but on occasions even large businesses experience downtime for a matter of unforeseen circumstances.
What was the impact?
With thousands of websites down, within minutes Fastly acknowledged that its content distribution network was the cause of the problem. During this period, our clients on the latest version of Percato, were able to successfully continue trading. In comparison, many off-the-shelf platforms with their own hosting solutions were affected. And, as a Shopify partner, this meant that a portion of our client’s were unable to avoid this temporary outage.
Within an hour, Fastly announced the issue had been resolved. A Fastly spokesperson said: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs [points of presence] globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online.”
The importance of fast, secure and reliable hosting
At 9xb, we work in partnership with industry leading, multi-award winning company Amazon Web Services, ensuring all our Peracto built eCommerce stores are PCI compliant and secure.
We understand that our client’s eCommerce stores are massively important to the effective running of their business, so it’s vital that it doesn’t let them down. Our cloud hosting solutions are state of the art, and provide maximum reliability with an uptime of excess 99.99%
This recent widely reported downtime has highlighted the importance of reliable and secure hosting. To find out more about our cloud hosting and security services, take a look here.
