Dozens of high-traffic websites including the New York Times, CNN, Twitch, Reddit, and the UK government’s home page, could not be reached. San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 1000 GMT. It said in repeated updates on its website that it was “continuing to investigate the issue.” According to Reuters, Amazon.com Inc’s retail website also seemed to face an outage. Amazon was not immediately available to comment.
Visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.” Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message while visits to the New York Times and UK government’s gov.uk site returned an “Error 503 Service Unavailable“ message, along with the line “Varnish cache server,“ which is a technology that Fastly is built on.
Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, said: “Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service.”
In a detailed thread on Twitter, the Guardian’s UK technology correspondent Alex Hern wrote that the “massive internet outage” has been traced to a failure in a content delivery network (CDN) run by Fastly.”
His thread also notes that the the outage, which began shortly before 11am UK time, saw visitors to a vast array of sites receive error messages including “Error 503 Service Unavailable” and a terse “connection failure”. When we tried accessing CNN, we also get the 503 error.
According to Hern’s thread the problem can be traced to Fastly, which is a cloud computing services provider, and runs an “edge cloud that is supposed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic.”
On its status page, Fastly says the issue has been identified and a fix has been implemented. It adds that customers may experience increased origin load as global services return. The status page noted nearly an hour back that they are “currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.”
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