Major media websites go down worldwide after brief outage at cloud service company
- Websites including CNN, BBC, The Guardian, Bloomberg News, The Financial Times and Le Monde are back online
- The outage appears to have been linked to a glitch at US-based provider Fastly
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High traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, BBC, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and The New York Times were out of commission, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. They came back up after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.
Fastly, one of the world’s most widely-used cloud-based content delivery network providers, said it reported a disruption from a “service configuration” and did not explain.
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“Incidents like this underline the fragility of the internet and its independence on a patchwork of fragmented technology. Ironically, this also underlines its inherent strength and how quickly it can recover,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight said.
“The fact that an outage like this can grab headlines around the world shows how rare it is.”
Fastly, which went public in 2019 and has a market capitalisation of more than US$5 billion, is far smaller than peers like Amazon’s AWS. It helps websites move content using less-congested routes, enabling them to reach consumers faster.
The United Kingdom’s attorney general earlier tweeted that the country’s main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.
The disruption may have caused issues for citizens booking Covid-19 vaccinations or reporting test results, the Financial Times reported.
Fastly’s website said that most of its coverage areas had faced “Degraded Performance”. Error messages on several of the websites pointed to Fastly problems.
Websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, The Guardian and Bloomberg News also faced outages.
News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the outage when their websites failed to load up.
Popular tech website the Verge used Google Docs to report news, while UK Technology Editor at The Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the problems.
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At the onset of the outage, 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.
Twitter users quickly jumped on the news, creating the #InternetShutdown hashtag with KITKAT’s official handle telling its 441,500 followers “Guess it’s time to Have A Break”.
“We were offline for a few minutes because the whole internet broke down,” tweeted Jitse Groen, chief executive of food delivery group Just Eat Takeaway.com.
Some 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.
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The websites of the White House and the British government were also hit by outages. The White House website had an error message but was available again later.
Error messages first appeared on the websites at around 10:00 GMT.
Fastly describes itself as an “edge cloud platform”. It provides vital behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web’s high profile sites, by helping them to store, or “cache”, content in servers around the world so that it’s closer to users.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse, Associated Press
