The internet jolted the minds of many people across the globe after major international websites, including the UK government’s official site, Amazon, New York Times and others crashed all of a sudden.
The issue erupted after mass complaints from users of India and several other countries who said on DownDetector that there was an outage of sites like Twitter, Reddit, Twitch, among others.
The matter appears to have seen the light of the day due to Fastly, the US-based cloud computing service provider, which powers Amazon and other companies’ CDN (content delivery network).
The service provider confirmed that its servers are down as it is investigating the matter. A notice on its website read, “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.” However, there was no cause of the outage mentioned in the notice. According to Fastly’s website, the first reports of “intermittent domain not found errors” started coming in at 1:18 am IST on Tuesday.
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After an hour of the announcement, Fastly released a statement on its Status page saying, “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”
The disruption of services affected thousands of users as around 21,000 of Reddit users and over 2,000 Amazon site visitors complained of the issue. More than 600 Twitch users and over 1000 Reddit users filed complaints on DownDetector, the outage monitoring site, after the affected websites weren’t loading on their browsers. Popular sites Spotify, Quora, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Bloomberg News and GitHub were also part of the list hit by the global outage.
Indian users too faced similar problems in accessing Google services like Drive and Search, according to DownDetector. Stack Overflow, PayPal, Vimeo and Shopify also witnessed complaints against their sites loading. Moreover, HBO Max, CNN and Hulu also appeared to be affected by it. The majority of users got an Error 503 service unavailable message pop up on their screens when they tried accessing the websites.
However, all Apple-related services that aren’t powered by Fastly CDN servers were functioning normally. CDN servers are proxy servers that cache a small amount of data that can retrieve the user’s location as accurate as possible to enhance the performance, delivery and availability of internet services in all regions. Fastly, and companies of its domain, have a global chain of CDN services, which greatly reduce the loading time of websites.
