An Outage Hit Major Websites. The Internet’s Infrastructure Appears Shaky.
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Consumers got a jolt this morning with “error 503 service unavailable” messages on some of their favorite websites.
An outage at cloud software provider
Fastly
caused swaths of the web to go dark, including Reddit, the New York Times, and even the U.K. government’s website. Fastly said that it had identified the problem and initiated a fix. An hour after the outages were first reported, Fastly said its global network was coming back online. Most of the impacted websites appeared to be back online as well.
It was really just a small irritation for consumers and investors Tuesday morning, but it could become a larger problem. Recent episodes of hacking and outages such as the
SolarWinds
hack and the Colonial pipeline ransomware attack demonstrate that internet infrastructure isn’t as robust as might assumed.
For now, it’s the stock of web services companies that run into problems that are impacted. Fastly has dropped 1.7% Tuesday morning. It also raises the possibility of higher costs for companies needing to beef up web security.
That’s good news, though, for companies that provide security as one company’s problem is always another’s opportunity.
FireEye,
for instance, was up about 2% in premarket trading
Tuesday’s outages look to be just a blip but the security issue isn’t going away. Investors should be asking their companies what they are doing to ensure…
