New Delhi: A widespread internet outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly led to a shutdown of several international government, media, e-commerce and news websites.
High traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal and Spotify were all listed as experiencing problems by outage tracking website Downdetector.com. Most appeared to be coming back up after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.
Among news websites like Financial Times, the New York Times and Bloomberg News that were hit, was also The Guardian which ran a dedicated live-blog on the outage on Twitter.
Beginning with where we are now: A massive internet outage, affecting websites including The Guardian, https://t.co/m4BpHUT5yb, Amazon, and Reddit has been traced to a failure in a content delivery network (CDN) run by Fastly.
— alex hern (@alexhern) June 8, 2021
The Guardian website is back up now and a report on the outage notes that, “The Verge published news to a shared Google Doc – until a reporter accidentally shared a link on Twitter that allowed the audience to edit it.”
The United Kingdom’s attorney general earlier tweeted that the country’s main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.
Our https://t.co/OuRsirGK5E page is currently down. If you need to contact the AGO you can email us at AGO.Correspondence@attorneygeneral.gov.uk
— Attorney General (@attorneygeneral) June 8, 2021
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.
Amazon’s Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector’s website.
Stack Overflow, GitHub, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, Vimeo and Shopify, were also down, Indian Express reported, according to Engadget.
It is not known yet if any Indian websites were affected by the outage.
Fastly, one of the world’s most widely-used cloud based content delivery network providers, said “the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”
The company, which went public in 2019, helps websites move content using less-congested routes, enabling them to reach consumers faster.
Fastly website said that most of its coverage areas had faced “Degraded Performance”. Error messages on several of the websites pointed to Fastly problems.
(With inputs by Reuters)