Multiple websites operated by international news outlets including the CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, Bloomberg News, The Financial Times, Le Monde went down worldwide on Tuesday (June 8).
Outages also hit social media across the globe, with some reports pointing to a glitch at US-based cloud computing services provider Fastly.
Other major internet platforms and sites including Amazon, Target, and the UK government website — Gov.uk — were also not working.
Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, said: “Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service.”
According to Fastly’s status page, its network was facing issues that caused “degraded performance” across all of its 81 data centres in the North America, South America, Europe, South Africa, India and Asia Pacific regions.
The reason behind the global internet disruption reported earlier has been identified and the fix “has been implemented,” Fastly announced. “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” the update on the company’s website read.
Fastly is a content delivery network (CDN) company that assists users to view digital content in a faster way. Apart from CDN services, it is also known to provide security, video delivery, and other edge-computing services.
Guardian journalist Alex Hern tweeted: “That technology inherently requires Fastly to sit between most of its clients and their users, meaning that if the service suffers a catastrophic failure, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all.”
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.
UPDATE 09/06/2021
Fastly said on Wednesday (June 09) the major global internet outage was caused by a bug in its software that was not triggered until one of its customer carried out settings changes that triggered the problem “which caused 85% of our network to return errors.” The company added: “Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal.”
With reporting by the BBC, CNN, Guardian, Reuters
