A huge outage occurred causing a number of major websites to go down, including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch. Some news sites were also affected, including the Guardian, New York Times, Financial Times and CNN. Streaming service Hulu also encountered problems, as did the UK government website gov.uk.
The outage also broke some parts of other services, such as emojis on Twitter.
Cloud computing provider Fastly is responsible for the issues. The company underpin a lot of major websites, and identified problems with its global content delivery network (CDN). A service configuration triggered the disruption, but the firm are implementing a fix by disabling it.
Fastly say, “Our global network is coming back online”.
Issues first began at about 11am BST. People attempting to access broken websites received a 503 error message telling them the service was unavailable.
Downtime lasted for around an hour, before websites started to be restored.
Fastly runs an “edge cloud”, designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from attacks, and help them during peak traffic times.
It looks as though the issues were localised, affecting only specific areas of Europe and the US.
The need for more hosts
Similar problems have occurred in the past with other large cloud computing firms, such as Amazon Web Services.
It highlights how fragile the internet infrastructure is as it it is in the hands of just a few companies. This means any time anything goes wrong with one of these services, it can cause a mass disruption across the globe. Issues with one company can affect so many different websites all at the same time. It is important to have a vast variety of hosting companies, to prevent such situations from happening.
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