Large parts of the Internet were offline for a long time today. The cause appears to have been a general outage.
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Many well-known news sites, such as The Guardian, the Financial Times, the New York Times, but also smaller sites and applications such as Reddit, Twitch, Amazon, PayPal and the UK government website gov.uk, went offline due to a problem affecting the internet.
Website visitors were faced with an error message: “Error 503 Service Unavailable.” The problem was widespread and was quickly linked to an outage on the Fastly and content delivery network (CDN).
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The Fastly service's status showed it was experiencing a global CDN disruption, which caused internet issues in many parts of the globe, with services across North America, South America, Europe, Asia/Pacific, South Africa, and India suffering from "degraded performance."
“We are currently investigating potential performance impacts with our CDN services,” Fastly said in a service update posted at 09:58 UTC.
Services began to return about 45 minutes later, when Fastly said: “The issue has been identified and a fix is being applied.” It is currently unclear what the exact issue was that led to the outage, and the company has not yet provided any more detailed comment.
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"We identified a service configuration that was causing outages at POPs [points of presence] globally and have disabled this configuration. Our global network is back online," the company said via Twitter.
At this time, services appear to have been restored across most of the planet.
