Three important reminders

A big reminder: We’re kicking off our series of birthday events with a fab conversation on Love, Marriage, Sex Etc. with Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, Leeza Mangaldas and Priya Alika-Elias. The time/date: Saturday, June 12 at 6:30 pm. This one is open to all subscribers so be sure to sign up here. Also: ICYMI, we carried more details on these wonderful ladies in our previous edition.

Also please remember: to ask your friends & fam to take advantage of our special birthday month discount on our three-month quarterly subscription. We are offering it at the low, low price of Rs 300 until June 30. It’s especially valuable since we don’t offer a monthly subscription any more.

Another birthday nudge: Here’s a reminder of our birthday wishlist—because we certainly don’t want you to miss out on that lol!

Toast or Roast: We’d be delighted if you send in a 15-20 second video/audio clip that either tells us why you love splainer: I love splainer because… Or it could be a clip that totally makes fun of us: splainer is soooo annoying because… Just something that’s fun for all of us!

Gift a sub: The best gift for splainer is to gift us to someone you like! And each one of them helps! (Just hit ‘gift a friend’ on the subscribe page)

Refer a friend: We’ve done very well in our first year, but we are nowhere near the top of this mountain. Our big goal in year #2 is to grow, grow, grow! Each time you share that referral link and say ‘I love splainer’, a new baby sub is born somewhere in the world!

Become a founding member: When we first started, our founding members helped us build a website, pay salaries and hosting fees etc. Thanks to their support, we now make enough revenue to take care of our daily bills. But we’re still a small company without big-time investors. And we need that bit extra to keep growing—whether in terms of tech development or new content. Please consider becoming a founding member—or (as some of our founding members have already done) renewing your support this year.

The story of the great internet outage

The TLDR: On June 8, vast swathes of the internet suddenly became unavailable for nearly an hour. While the disruption was temporary, it revealed just how dependent we are on a handful of invisible companies for our online access. We explain what happened and why it is worrying.

Say hello to the CDN

The entire outage was the result of a software bug in a Content Delivery Network called Fastly. And here’s what a CDN does:

• When we browse a website, we assume that we are getting the information directly from there. This is almost entirely untrue. 
• In most cases, we are accessing a copy of that content from a server closer to our location—served to us by a Content Delivery Network. 
• Large websites hire a CDN to make and store copies of its content in locations around the world. These locations are called ‘points of presence’ (POPs).
• So when you click on a story on, say, BBC News, your device does not fetch its content all the way from the UK. Thanks to Fastly, it will bring a copy of that content from a POP closer to you.  
• The shorter transit period means that the content shows up a lot faster: ““It basically enables really high performance for content, whether that’s streaming video or a site or all the little images that pop up when you go to an ecommerce site… Serving it really close to the user takes away a lot of the load time.”
• Fastly boasts that it has made loading pages on Buzzfeed 50% faster and allowed The New York Times to simultaneously handle 2 million readers on election night.
• CDNs like Fastly also act like traffic cops: “It is like orchestrating traffic flow on a massive road system… If some link on the internet fails or gets congested, CDN algorithms quickly find an alternate route to the destination.”

Here’s a visualisation of how Fastly’s service works:

Point to note: Fastly is a San Francisco-based company that has a $5 billion valuation. It operates POPs in “at least 58 cities around the world, including multiples in densely populated areas like Los Angeles, London, and Singapore. It lists their combined global capacity at a whopping 130 terabits per second.” And it services a number of very large companies including Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, eBay, Twitch, Pinterest—and of course media websites like New York Times, CNN, BBC News etc. 

The mighty software bug

In a blog post, Fastly’s senior VP of engineering explained what went wrong. The company issued an update on May 12—which accidentally introduced a bug in its software. But the bug remained in the system—kinda like a sleeper cell—until a single customer activated it on Monday by changing their configuration. This error was pushed out to multiple servers at the same time, creating a cascading effect. Soon, 85% of Fastly’s networks were returning 503 errors—where you click on a web page and it basically tells you that the server hosting the website can’t service your request for content.

Point to note: Fastly says it detected the problem within one minute, and restored service to 95% of the network in 49 minutes. Its servers were still a little slow for a couple more hours—as the POP servers had to first go back to the original websites to fetch copies of their content.  

A cautionary tale

Complaints, suggestions or just wanna say hi? Talk to us at talktous@splainer.in