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A critical global internet outage has hit websites across the globe on Tuesday morning, affecting news websites and social media platforms.
Global Internet Outage Puts Many Websites out of Commission
A glitch at Fastly, a popular CDN provider, is thought to be the reason, according to a product manager at Financial Times. Fastly has also confirmed it’s facing an outage on its status website.
Websites such as Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and Financial Times are currently facing an outage.
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”. Find the thread below:
https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/1402210287504273411
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, Fastly is the source of the problem. Fastly 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”.
This situation is still developing.
Update 1
Some sites like The Guardian, Fastly itself, and a lot of other affected websites are live now. Interestingly, Twitter already had a hashflag for the #internetdown.
The affected sites are fast coming back, and Fastly is conducting the reason behind this outage.
https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/1402218705568690185
Update 2
Fastly has now reported that it has identified the problem and applied a fix to the Global CDN Outage. However, the exact reason behind it is still unknown.
/vnd/media/post_attachments/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Global-CDN-Disruption.png "Global CDN Disruption")
Fastly said in a tweet that it has identified a service configuration that triggered across its POPs. The CDN service provider has now disabled that configuration, and now the network is coming online.