Fastly – the content delivery network that advertises ‘performance you can count on’ – “should have anticipated” the bug that disabled high profile publishers for 49 minutes yesterday.

Engineering and infrastructure senior vice president Nick Rockwell says in a blog the global outage was due to an “undiscovered software bug that surfaced when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change”.

Rockwell says the disruption was detected within a minute, the cause identified and isolated, and  the configuration disabled. About 95 per cent of the network was running as normal within 49 minutes.

The outage – described as “broad and severe” – affected global sites including the New York Times, the Guardian, Reddit, Twitch, CNN, Pinterest, the BBC and Bloomberg, as well as US and UK government websites. Nine’s The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review, and 10Play were among Australian sites affected.

The service is one of several global services which mirror and redeliver content locally, reducing download times.