https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57413224 BBC Homepage * Skip to content * Accessibility Help * Your account * Home * News * Sport * Reel * Worklife * Travel * Future * Culture * MenuMore Search * Home * News * Sport * Reel * Worklife * Travel * Future * Culture * Music * TV * Weather * Sounds Close menu BBC News Menu * Home * Coronavirus * Video * World * US & Canada * UK * Business * Tech * Science * Stories * Entertainment & Arts More * Health * In Pictures * Reality Check * World News TV * Newsbeat * Long Reads * Tech One Fastly customer triggered internet meltdown By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter Published 12 hours ago comments Comments Share close Share page Copy link About sharing Laptop next to a serverimage copyrightGetty Images image captionOne customer changing their settings had set in motion a major internet blackout, Fastly said A major internet blackout that hit many high-profile websites on Tuesday has been blamed on a software bug. Fastly, the cloud-computing company responsible for the issues, said the bug had been triggered when one of its customers had changed their settings. The outage has raised questions about relying on a handful of companies to run the vast infrastructure that underpins the internet. Fastly apologised and said the problem should have been anticipated. The outage, which lasted about an hour, hit some popular websites such as Amazon, Reddit, the Guardian and the New York Times. Fastly senior engineering executive Nick Rockwell said: "This outage was broad and severe - and we're truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them." Man examining a server rackimage copyrightGetty Images image captionThe problem had been spotted and rectified within 50 minutes, Fastly said The company operates servers at strategic points around the world to help customers move and store content close to their end users. But a customer quite legitimately changing their settings had exposed a bug in a software update issued to customers in mid-May, causing "85% of our network to return errors", it said. Engineers had worked out the cause of the problem about 40 minutes after websites had gone offline at about 11:00 BST, Fastly said. "Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal," it said. The company has deployed a bug fix across its network and promised a "post mortem of the processes and practices we followed during this incident" and to "figure out why we didn't detect the bug during our software quality assurance and testing processes". View comments Related Topics * Internet More on this story * Websites begin to work again after major breakage Published 1 day ago Top Stories * US 'to buy 500m Covid vaccine doses for world' The plan to provide doses for about 100 countries comes as Joe Biden arrives in the UK for a G7 summit. 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