An overall decline hit websites around the world this morning June 8. THE most important newspaper sites in the world they suddenly broke down. Just before noon they were downstairs NyTimes, Guardian, BBC. But also Le Monde, Financial Times, The Verge, Le Monde. In Italy at the bottom of the Corriere della Sera and La Gazzetta dello Sport. Not only that: malfunctions were also recorded on Amazon, Reddit, Twitch and GitHub. And institutional sites have also been disconnected, such as that of UK government and, for a few minutes, that of the White House.

The errors reported were different: from an interruption of the connection to the server (Error 503) at lack of domain recognition. The problem was, however, on a global scale. It covers American sites, but also European or Australian sites. And it would be thanks to the CDN, or the Content Delivery Network. It is a content distribution system made up of servers spread around the world on different networks. The site, to disseminate its content in a faster and easier way, can delegate the action to the CDN, which “replicates” the content on its servers and distributes them to users who request them. The malfunction was resolved in the afternoon. Some sites remained inaccessible for hours, others experienced hiccups. Originally there was a widespread disruption of CDN services US cloud computing provider Fastly. This, as shown on the official website, investigating what happened. The cause has been discovered: a technical failure, and therefore not a hacker attack.

As mentioned, the Corriere website was also affected by the malfunction. Our home page and our articles were inaccessible for about twenty minutes. We were back online at 12.17 thanks to an internal backup infrastructure. In the afternoon, with the supplier’s confirmation of the complete resolution of the problem, the situation returned to normal.