Amazon's website was one of a number of major global website that appeared to be affected by outages on Tuesday.
Photograph by Quinn Rooney/Getty ImagesTens of thousands of people trying to access major global websites covering news, e-commerce, and government reported outages early on Tuesday.
Sites including the New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the Guardian, Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, Twitch, and the U.K. government website were down, based on user reports on the outage monitoring site Downdetector.com and from attempts at access by Barron’s reporters.
By 8 a.m. Eastern most of the sites appeared to be back to normal after Fastly, a cloud computing provider, said it had applied a fix. Fastly said on its website that it had identified the issue and that a fix was applied shortly after 6.30 a.m. Eastern — the first reports of outages emerged around 5.30 a.m. Eastern.
Fastly added that customers may continue to experience problems as global services return.
Just before 6 a.m., it said was investigating the potential impact to the performance of its CDN (content delivery network) services.
Fastly stock was 1.9% lower in premarket trading on Tuesday.
A screenshot from Downdetector.com shows a spike in reported problems with a number of major websites.
Attempts at accessing the New York Times website early on Tuesday brought the error message “connection failure,” while access was blocked to the Guardian’s website with the message “unknown domain.”
A number of affected websites, including the U.K. government’s site, displayed the message “Error 503 Service Unavailable.”
A Fastly spokesperson said: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs (points of presence) globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online.”
Matthew McDermott, a senior officer at global tech policy consultancy Access Partnership, said: “Fastly responded quickly to restored the issue but this serves as a reminder that resilience is an important part of digital infrastructure to modern life.”
“Organisations and government bodies need to look at implementing the steps that look to assess, stabilize, improve and monitor to ensure this issue do not pose further problems in the future,” he added.
Write to Callum Keown at callum.keown@dowjones.com