Thousands of websites return after going dark from Fastly outage
Thousands of websites return after being hit by outages that lasted up to an hour
WASHINGTON : Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were coming back online yesterday after being hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly.
High traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and The New York Times were out of commission, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
They came back up after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.
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 helps websites move content using less-congested routes, enabling them to reach consumers faster.
Britain's Attorney-General earlier tweeted that the country's gov.uk website was down, providing an e-mail for queries.
The disruption may have caused issues for citizens booking Covid-19 vaccinations or reporting test results, the Financial Times reported.
Fastly's website said most of its coverage areas had faced "degraded performance". Error messages on several of the websites pointed to Fastly problems. Websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, The Guardian and Bloomberg News also faced outages.
News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the widespread outage when their websites failed to load up.
Tech website The Verge used Google Docs to report news, while Mr Alex Hern, the UK technology editor at The Guardian, started a Twitter thread to report on the problems.
At the onset of the outage, 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. - REUTERS
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