Fastly outage underscores slow creep of digital services risk

A recent outage at content delivery network Fastly took down thousands of websites in different countries, including big names, such as Amazon, Twitter and Spotify, for nearly an hour. It is the latest large outage highlighting the downside of a key trend in digital infrastructure: The growth in dependency on digital service providers can undermine infrastructure resilience and business continuity.

The conundrum here is one of conflicting double standards. While many companies expend substantial money and time on hardening and testing their own data center and IT infrastructure against disruptions, they also increasingly rely on cloud service providers whose architectural details and operational practices are largely hidden from them.