“On June 08.06.2021th, 5, many websites will no longer work or will only work with a delay. According to media reports, some large providers are affected. The reason for this is said to be a failure at the cloud service provider Fastly. A statement from David Warburton, Principal Threat Research Evangelist at FXNUMX Labs, on the current global Internet issues.
The failure throws a spotlight on an unpleasant long-term development of the Internet, centralization to a few providers. However, it is not due to the Internet itself. Even after almost 40 years, it still proves how well it was designed to this day. Because it has many layers for resilience and redundancy. The web as a whole is designed for decentralization. Since it does not rely on a single central system, several components can in principle fail and the Internet traffic finds another way to reach the desired destination.
Little competition - high risk of failure
However, in the last ten years there has been an unwanted centralization of many core services by large cloud solution providers such as infrastructure providers and CDNs. They work like a supermarket. Many of us appreciate the convenience of buying all of our groceries from one big store instead of going to a dozen different corner shops. Similarly, cloud solution providers offer many benefits such as faster application delivery, easier management, and flexible scaling.
However, this comes at the cost of a major disadvantage: when a cloud solution provider struggles, it can mean that not just a few websites and services are offline, but hundreds or thousands. The impact can have a negative impact on customer satisfaction, revenue, and company reputation.
Cloud solution providers offer numerous advantages, but lessons like today show that the centralization of the Internet creates the very problems that the original design wanted to avoid through redundancy. Therefore, companies should choose an approach that takes them away from single points of failure. Otherwise we will experience problems like today more often.”
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