Dozens of major websites — including The New York Times, CNN, Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify — were beginning to return online Tuesday morning after crashing in an apparent massive internet outage.
The cause of the outage was not immediately clear. Fastly, a popular content delivery network (CDN), confirmed it was experiencing an outage on its website and said around 7 a.m. ET that a fix had been implemented.
The service added that customers “may experience increased origin load as global services return.”
Fastly helps websites with significant amounts of traffic distribute user flow across many smaller, distributed networks.
When a CDN goes down, it often takes many sites with it, but it’s usually not too hard to fix.
A Reuters report said:
Multiple outages hit social media, government and news websites across the globe on Tuesday morning, with some reports pointing to a glitch at U.S.-based cloud computing services provider Fastly.
High traffic websites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify and the New York Times were listed as experiencing problems by outage tracking website Downdetector.com, although several appeared to be coming back up.
The UK’s attorney general tweeted that the country’s main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.
Fastly said “the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”
Earlier, most of Fastly’s coverage areas were facing “Degraded Performance”, the company’s website showed.
Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the root cause of the outages.
Nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to Downdetector.com.
Amazon’s Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector’s website.
Websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times and Bloomberg News also faced outages.
An earlier report said:
A huge internet outage has affected large swaths of the internet, including major sites like Amazon, Reddit, Twitter and Twitch, along with news sites including the New York Times and The Guardian. The source of the problem is the Fastly content delivery network (CDN), which has confirmed a global disruption. On its status page, Fastly said “we’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.”
Other affected sites include Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo and Shopify, as our sister site TechCrunch has noted. While some are completely down with 503 errors, only images are affected on certain sites like Twitter and Amazon.
Fastly describes itself as an “edge” network, sitting between users and websites. It includes their content delivery network, image optimization, video and streaming, cloud security, and load balancing services. Much like with Cloudflare, which went down last year, a failure on Fastly can affect enormous areas of the internet.
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