Posted by - August 30, 2021

Corporate websites have become a must-have for modern organizations.  Corporations, non-profits, and even government bodies maintain websites in order to reach consumers, host information, and provide a means of contact. There are even professionals dedicated to creating content, improving how high a website appears in searches, and maintaining website functionality.  When a website goes down unexpectedly, it can lead to lost revenue for companies and lost donations for non-profits.  For government entities, there isn’t a risk of lost revenue–rather, it removes what could be an important source of information for website visitors.  It can also create a sense of panic when an institution has an unexplained outage.  So what happens when an incredible amount of websites for a variety of important organizations all go down simultaneously?

Early this morning, websites from entities including government websites for the White House and Gov.uk, social media platform Reddit, and news websites including ones for the New York Times, Forbes, and the BBC were down due to a widespread outage apparently linked to the popular content-delivery network Fastly. Fastly, a content-delivery network made newly popular by the pandemic-driven boom for many of its technology-focused clients, has not yet elaborated on what exactly happened to cause the outage, only that it has been resolved.  Larger companies with in-house content delivery systems, such as Netflix and Facebook, were unaffected.

As of now, there’s no indication that a digital threat actor was involved. That makes it a teaching moment for the small companies that rely on other services, whether it’s a content-delivery network like Fastly or a hosting site like WordPress, in order to do business.  While these services are incredibly useful for small-business owners looking to save money, they can also fail unexpectedly, leaving you without much recourse.  Whether its a hacker or a system failure that results in your downtime, it’s important to have a backup plan. If you’re interested in creating one, reach out to us at info@optfinITy.com to learn more.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *