Topline
Several major websites including news websites, social media platforms, payment providers and even U.K. government domains were knocked offline on Tuesday morning following an outage at content distribution network Fastly, in what is the latest instance of a large swathe of the internet being affected due problems at a single platform.
A wide range of major websites including eBay, Paypal, The Financial Times, Reddit, Twitch and The ... [+]
Key Facts
The outage, which began at around 6 a.m. ET, impacted several websites including the New York Times, CNN, the Guardian, Reddit, Twitch, Spotify, Hulu, HBO Max, Paypal and gov.uk domains.
Forbes’ website was also impacted by the outage.
According to Fastly’s website, the company was experiencing a Global Content Delivery Network disruption, however, it has since identified a fix that has allowed some of the sites to come back online.
A Content Delivery Network is a geographically distributed network of servers used by websites to speed up the delivery of their content.
CDNs act as proxy networks for content platforms—like streaming services and news websites—by storing caches of their content across different locations and allowing users to stream or download that content at high speeds with minimal hitches.
Fastly’s CDN is popular with media sites and its competitors include Cloudflare, Amazon’s CloudFront and Akamai.
Key Background
Last December, Google was hit with a large global outage taking down all its major services including Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Drive. At the time, Google blamed the issue on an authentication system outage that prevented users from logging into their accounts. In November, Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant’s cloud service, was also hit with a similar outage that disrupted large portions of the web. Both outages had led to debates about the oversized footprint of giant cloud companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft and the domino effect their outages can have on the entire web.
Further Reading
Global glitch: swaths of internet go down after cloud outage (Associated Press)
Huge web outage takes Reddit, Twitch, and other big sites offline for an hour (The Verge)
Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit and more go down in Fastly CDN outage (TechCrunch)
