Irish Examiner view: Internet services need to be reliable

The internet has become such a dominant part of our lives that it is essential that access to it can be relied on.

The response by the company behind a major global internet outage this week is both encouraging and worrying at the same time. 

Fastly, one of the world's most widely used cloud-based content delivery network providers, has said the incident was caused by a bug in its software that was triggered when one of its customers changed their settings.

The problem with Fastly knocked out the sites of news providers such as The Irish Times, The Guardian, BBC.com, and The New York Times, as well as  Reddit and Amazon.com.

The internet has become such a dominant part of our lives that it is essential that access to it can be relied on.

However, that is not always the case, as can be seen by last month’s cyberattack by criminals that crippled certain health services here. 

Indeed, according to the HSE, while good progress has been made in restoring some of its systems, services around the country are still being affect and are experiencing significant disruptions.

There was no criminality involved in the Fastly outage, but the consequences were similar, although not as long-lasting. 

The company managed to fix the problem for most servers in less than an hour. 

However, it failed to detect the bug in the first place, with serious consequences.

The issue also highlights the fragility of the internet and its reliance on fragmented technology operated by a few infrastructure companies.