A widespread internet outage impacted some of the world’s biggest internet services including Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitch and Reddit on Tuesday afternoon.
The outage also affected websites including gov.uk, the Guardian, BBC, CNN and New York Times. Services such as Stack Overflow, GitHub, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo and Shopify had also been impacted by the outage as per reports.
The outage was traced to a technical error traced to a glitch in a content delivery network (CDN) run by Fastly.
Major websites facing outage returned nearly 503 errors, as per reports and screenshots shared by users on social media with Fastly appearing in some of these errors. While some websites were down globally, the issue impacted sections of certain websites such as images on Twitter and Amazon.
Fastly on its status page had confirmed that it was facing an outage at around 09:58 UTC (3:28 pm IST).
The outage was not universal as users residing in certain cities globally faced issues. It impacted the company’s network in certain cities globally.
The company reported the incident as a “Global CDN Disruption” on its website. The issue was caused by a service configuration that affected the company’s point of presence globally. The outage lasted for nearly an hour as a fix was applied at around 4:30 PM IST.
“We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online,” the company said in a tweet.
CDNs are an important aspect of the internet infrastructure. CDNs act as proxy servers where companies can cache certain data closer to the end-user to offer better services.
As noted by TechCrunch, Fastly is popular with many media majors.
Globally, the incident had affected various cities in the Asia Pacific, South America, Europe, Noth America and South Africa. In India, it had impacted services in Chennai, Mumbai and New Delhi.