Multiple outages hit websites across the globe on Tuesday morning, affecting news websites and social media platforms. According to Reuters, Amazon.com Inc’s retail website also seemed to face an outage. Amazon was not immediately available to comment. Reddit, Twitch, Spotify and Pinterest were also impacted.
Leading websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, CNN were 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.
In a detailed thread on Twitter, the 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.”
His thread also notes that the 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”. When we tried accessing CNN, we also get the 503 error.