What are content delivery networks and why big websites crash together

Such networks are popular with large, high-traffic websites and those offering big files to download

You don’t hear much about content-delivery networks, or CDNs, until they stop delivering. A global outage of major websites on June 8 that lasted about an hour was caused by problems at the San Francisco-based Fastly Inc. It took down websites including the New York Times, Bloomberg News and even the UK government.

What is a content-delivery network?

It’s a kind of bridge between a website or app and a user, helping to push data quickly around the internet on behalf of some of the most popular online companies. CDN providers do that by hosting multiple servers and directing people who call