OP-ED: Why did the sites go down?

Explaining the Fastly internet outage
If you were having difficulty accessing your favourite website on Tuesday, you’re not alone. A jaw-dropping number of major websites around the globe suddenly became unavailable with no immediately obvious explanation -- before reappearing an hour later.

It’s disconcerting when the sites we rely on suddenly become inaccessible, and even more so when it happens on such a vast scale. This outage saw seemingly unrelated sites go dark, including the BBC, Pinterest, the Financial Times, Reddit, and even The Conversation.

How can so many sites, from so many different organizations, all be affected by the same incident? To understand the answer, you need to know what a CDN (content delivery network) is and how crucial they are to the smooth running of the internet.