Major websites begin to come back online after internet outage

Dozens of sites, including Amazon, Reddit, the New York Times, Bloomberg News, and the Guardian could not be reached.

The UK government's main website was unavailable while the White House site had an error message for a period [Getty Images]

Government, news and social media websites across the globe have begun come back online after being hit by a widespread outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly.

High traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network, and The New York Times were all listed as experiencing problems by tracking website Downdetector.com on Tuesday, but came back up after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.

Fastly, one of the world’s most widely used cloud based content delivery network providers, said “the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return”.

France’s Le Monde newspaper started showing error messages that appeared on the website at approximately 10:00 GMT. Britain’s Guardian newspaper said its website and app were affected. Sites of other British news media were also not loading.

The United Kingdom’s attorney general tweeted that the country’s main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.

The disruption may have caused issues for citizens booking COVID-19 vaccinations or reporting test results, the Financial Times reported.

Messages such as “Error 503 Service Unavailable” and “connection failure” appeared.

San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 10:00 GMT and many of the websites were slowly coming back online by 11:00 GMT. It later said that most of its coverage areas had faced “Degraded Performance”.

‘Widespread outage’

Visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message saying: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.”

Down Detector earlier said: “Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service.”

Fastly describes itself as an “edge cloud platform”. It provides vital behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the internet’s high-profile websites by helping them store, or “cache”, content on servers around the world so it is closer to users.

Nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to Downdetector.com.

Twitter users quickly jumped on the global outage, creating the #InternetShutdown hashtag with KITKAT’s official handle telling followers, “Guess it’s time to Have A Break.”

“We were offline for a few minutes because the whole internet broke down,” tweeted Jitse Groen, chief executive of food delivery group Just Eat Takeaway.com.

Source: News Agencies