Internet Outage: Amazon, New York Times & Others Go Dark

Multiple outages hit websites across the globe on Tuesday morning. A number of leading media websites such as New York Times Guardian went down showing ‘Error 303 Unavailable’ messages. The UK government’s website -gov.UK- also faced downtime. This happened after services from the private Content-Delivery Network (CDN) ‘Fastly’ went down.

Quora was also down for users in India, though it appears to be back now. Other sites impacted were Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, and Shopify, according to Engadget.

Guardian’s UK technology correspondent Alex Hern wrote that the “massive internet outage” has been traced to a failure in a content delivery network (CDN) run by Fastly.” Fastly, is a cloud computing services provider. It runs an “edge cloud that is supposed to speed up loading times for websites. It protects them from denial-of-service attacks, and also help them deal with bursts of traffic.”

Check out his tweets here:

Beginning with where we are now: A massive internet outage, affecting websites including The Guardian, https://t.co/m4BpHUT5yb, Amazon, and Reddit has been traced to a failure in a content delivery network (CDN) run by Fastly.

— alex hern (@alexhern) June 8, 2021

The outage, which began shortly before 11am UK time, saw visitors to a vast array of sites receive error messages including “Error 503 Service Unavailable” and a terse “connection failure”.

— alex hern (@alexhern) June 8, 2021

Fastly, a cloud computing services provider, has been identified as the cause of the problem. The company runs an “edge cloud”, which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic.

— alex hern (@alexhern) June 8, 2021

Fastly noted an error on its status update page at 4.28 pm IST. They stated: “we’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.” On its status page, Fastly soon said that the issue has been identified and a fix has been implemented.

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