UK Govt, CNN, Reddit, Other Major Websites Go Offline Following Cloud Company, Fastly’s Server Outage

Countless websites and apps around the world experienced an outage earlier today, June 8 after Fastly, a major content delivery network, reported a widespread failure.

The American cloud computing service provider admitted it was facing issues just before 11am, with many websites linked to content delivery network (CDN) showing an ‘error 503’ message.

Some news sites and apps affected include; CNN, the Guardian, New York Times, Financial Times, New York Times and Bloomberg News, Independent and Buzzfeed.

Other major internet platforms and sites that showed errors messages were Amazon, Target, and UK government website — Gov.uk, Stack Overflow, Twitch, Pinterest, HBO Max, Hulu, Reddit, Spotify, GitHub, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe and more.

According to Al Jazeera, CNN and France’s Le Monde started showing error messages that appeared on the websites at around 10:00 GMT. Later on, Al Jazeera was also affected, then Amazon.com Inc’s retail website also seemed to face an outage.

Amid this, Fastly confirmed its facing an outage on its status website, saying;

We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.

Shortly after, some websites slowly began to come back online, during which San Francisco-headquartered Fastly on its status page said; “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented”.

An hour later, the issue seems to be resolved as affected websites and services now load normally.

Giving a situation report, Fastly wrote on its website;

This incident affects: Europe (Amsterdam (AMS), Dublin (DUB), Frankfurt (FRA), Frankfurt (HHN), London (LCY)), North America (Ashburn (BWI), Ashburn (DCA), Ashburn (IAD), Ashburn (WDC), Atlanta (FTY), Atlanta (PDK), Boston (BOS), Chicago (ORD), Dallas (DAL), Los Angeles (LAX)), and Asia/Pacific (Hong Kong (HKG), Tokyo (HND), Tokyo (TYO), Singapore (QPG))

Giving a reason for the outage, Fastly tweeted;

We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online. Continued status is available at https://t.co/RIQWX0LWwl

— Fastly (@fastly) June 8, 2021

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a key part of the internet infrastructure. These companies run global networks of servers to improve performance and availability of web services.

Fastly helps improve load times for websites and provides other services to internet sites, apps and platforms — including a large global server network.

Major website and app outages happen from time to time and typically don’t last long — internet service providers, content delivery networks and other hosting services are built with multiple redundancies and a global network of backup servers designed to reduce disruptions when things go haywire.