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goobster · 1046 days ago · link · · parent · post: Fastly is down, and has brought down vast swathes of the Web with it.
This is the thing with CDNs... why does one going down cause an outage, and not a slowdown? The whole point of a CDN (content delivery network) is to cache frequently accessed content physically nearer the viewer, to reduce load times. The actual source data still exists on the source servers back at the host... the CDN is just carrying a COPY of the data. So when the CDN goes down, why doesn't the system just failover to the original (albeit slower) servers, instead of 404ing everything? Is this just sloppy coding on the host's side of things? Are the CDN's being too heavily leveraged as the ONLY data source...?