UK government homepage knocked offline by Fastly glitch
UK The government's homepage was among the websites that were affected early Tuesday due to the shutdown of content delivery network Fastly.
Gov.uk was unavailable for more than an hour for some users, along with major news organizations including the New York Times, Bloomberg and the Financial Times.
Content delivery networks are an important part of the global Internet infrastructure and provide servers that improve the performance and availability of web services to users in various locations. Media content is often cached on CDN servers so that it doesn't need to be fetched on the origin server every time a user loads a web page.
As of 9:25 a.m., a Fastly spokesperson said the company had identified and disabled a service configuration that caused disruption to its network's local access points.
"Our global network is coming back online," the spokesperson said.
Commenting on the outage, Matt McDermott, a senior official at technology policy consultancy Access Partnership, said the incident served as a reminder that government agencies should have a quick response plan in place to deal with such outages.
"Organizations and government bodies need to focus on implementing the steps they look to assess, stabilize, improve and monitor to ensure that this issue does not create further problems in the future," he said. “Evaluation is needed to determine the server bottleneck, then stabilizing the problem with the implementation of quick fixes will reduce the impact on wider stakeholders and users.”
Speaking with Fedscoop, McDermott said that depending on the nature of the problem, automated early warning systems could allow serious cyber incidents to be averted.
“Even a few minutes of additional warning of an impending outage can help preserve critical services. In these situations, it becomes very difficult to maintain everything but to protect key assets. Emergency capacity can be utilized,” he said.
A spokesperson for the UK Government's Digital Service said: "We are aware of the issues with gov.uk, which means users cannot currently access the site. This is a widespread issue affecting many other websites. We We are investigating it immediately."