Content delivery network failure
The failure of an intermediary that serves thousands of sites from its own edge servers, leaving services unreachable although their own infrastructure is intact.
A content delivery network places servers at the edge of the network, so a site's pages, images and scripts reach visitors from a nearby point. That speeds up loading, absorbs traffic spikes and filters denial of service attacks. The trade-off is interposition: the visitor now talks to the intermediary instead of the origin server. When the intermediary fails, the service becomes unreachable while the insured's own infrastructure is intact, and its own backups are of no use. The market is highly concentrated. A handful of operators serve a substantial share of global traffic, which makes each one an accumulation point insureds are often unaware of, since the relationship may sit with an agency rather than with them. Recorded incidents show near-instant propagation: a configuration change reaches every point of presence within minutes, without the gradual rollout that would allow it to be halted. For underwriting, one point decides: contingent business interruption cover responds only where the wording names this kind of supplier, and many pre-2021 texts do not.
On June 8, 2021, a configuration change by a single customer triggered a latent software fault at the operator Fastly and took many major websites offline for roughly an hour, including those of several governments and international news organizations.
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