A UNIVERSITY of York professor has shared his perspective on the worldwide internet outage which, he claims, sent "the world into chaos". 

Professor Mark Rodbert, visiting professor in computer science at the University of York and founder of cybersecurity firm Idax Software, said the incident showed the internet was too reliant on a small number of companies to stay online.

“It is remarkable that within ten minutes, one outage can send the world into chaos,” he said.

“This demonstrates the extent to which the move to the cloud has changed the things that companies need to protect.

“Whether the people inside a company or a supplier have made a mistake, or malicious perpetrators outside the perimeter have created the problem, it’s so important that we create firebreaks in the system so that if one company, or even just one well-connected employee, is compromised, the whole system isn’t brought to its knees.”

The Fastly issue reported to be behind the global internet outage was probably due to a physical issue rather than software related, a software testing expert has told the PA news agency.

“Given the nature of this kind of technology, it’s probably not a software issue,” said Adam Leon Smith, from BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

“It’s more likely to be a physical issue or a hardware failure somewhere.”

Fastly updated its service status page, saying: “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”