Fastly reveals the real reason for its massive outage — pouring cold water on QAnon conspiracy theories

After the global internet outage caused a vast number of websites to go dark on Tuesday, theories began circulating about the reason for the interruption. Now, Fastly, is setting the record straight and explaining what really happened.

According to Axios, Fastly, the content delivery network (CDN) at the center of the outage, is attributing its circumstance to a "software bug." In a blog post published on Tuesday, June 8, Nick Rockwell, the senior vice president of engineering and infrastructure at Fastly, revealed the outage was triggered "by a customer making a 'valid' change in their computer settings."

Rockwell also noted the timeline of the outage and how the provider managed to complete the restoration process.

"We detected the disruption within one minute, then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal," said Rockwell.

"This outage was broad and severe, and we're truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them," he added.

The outage quickly caused an uproar across various online platforms. While outages will occur from time to time, the Associated Press noted that the significance of Fastly's outage as it underscores "how the much of the global internet is dependent on a handful of behind the scenes companies like Fastly that provide vital infrastructure, and it amplified concerns about how vulnerable they are to more serious disruption."

Fastly's remarks follow an array of QAnon conspiracy theories about the massive outage. When high-trafficked websites like Amazon, CNN, The New York Times, and Reddit were left dark as a result of the outage, conspiracy theorists quickly weighed in with their assertions. However, Fastly insists no cyber attack caused the unfortunate outage.