It has been a rough few months for the internet.
In June, Fastly Inc.’s content-delivery network failure forced some of the world’s biggest e-commerce and media websites offline. Later, there were massive data breaches at T-Mobile U.S. Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch streaming service. And just recently, Facebook Inc.’s main social network, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for about six hours. Then it happened again — albeit more briefly.
All the incidents had a common corporate response. It goes something like this: We are sorry, it was an unintentional configuration error, we’ll do better next time! After Facebook’s outage, the engineering director at security software firm Cloudflare Inc. called it a reminder about the fragile nature of internet, where millions of interconnected systems are dependent on each other to make it work.