Social media, news sites including CNN, New York Times hit by outage
Social media, streaming services and global news outlets including the New York Times and CNN were hit Tuesday by outages, with some users unable to access the sites.
Some visitors to the affected websites received error
messages that read, “Error 503 Service Unavailable,” while others read simply,
“connection failure.”
It’s unclear what caused the sweeping outages, but it
appears to be related to major problems with a cloud service provider.
San Francisco-based cloud computing services provider Fastly
announced early Tuesday that it’s experiencing a technical issue. The firm said
on its website that it’s investigating the issue.
Fastly operates a content delivery network service that many
websites use to help speed up the loading of their web pages for users.
Matt Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times, wrote
on Twitter: “Fastly, the CDN provider, is having a massive outage, resulting in
Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit, The Guardian, and the FT returning 503
errors.”According to downdetector, Reddit, Amazon, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon Web
Services, Etsy, Twitter, Google, Target, Spotify and others were all affected.
The United Kingdom’s government website, gov.UK, was also
affected by the outage.
“Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at
Fastly, which may be impacting your service,” downdetector said on its site.
Downdetector’s site showed that the issues had largely
subsided by 7:20 a.m. ET.
“The issue has been identified and a fix is being
implemented,” Fastly said at 6:44 a.m. ET.
“The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied,”
Fastly added at 6:57. “Customers may experience increased origin load as global
services return.”
Social media users quickly joked about the sweeping outage.
User @DarthMewtwo posted a meme questioning how one company’s outage could
ripple throughout so much of the internet.
Others joked about starting their first day of work at
Fastly on Tuesday. User @_BillieBelieves wrote, “Just trying to log in for my
first day as Fastly’s Head of PR Keep getting an error when I try, maybe HR
haven’t set me up yet?”
Another user called it an “internet apocalypse,” while
another said “everything just shut out of nowhere.”
“Me on my first day at #Fastly: What does this button do?”
wrote user @MarktheBlogger1 along with a gif of a forklift crashing.
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