(ETH) – Multiple websites went offline briefly across the globe Tuesday after an outage at the cloud service company Fastly, revealing how critical a handful of companies running the internet’s plumbing have become. Dozens of sites including the New York Times, CNN, some Amazon sites, Twitch, Reddit, the Guardian, and the U.K. government’s home page, could not be reached.
In Asia, cities like Hong Kong and Singapore were also affected, with users unable to access the CNN website. In China, where most foreign media websites are blocked, there was little discussion on the outage on social media platforms such as Weibo.
San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 6 a.m. Eastern. It said in repeated updates on its website that it was “continuing to investigate the issue.”
About an hour later, the company said: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.” A number of sites that were hit early appeared to be coming back online.
Fastly said it had identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions, meaning the outage appeared to be caused internally. Still, all major futures markets in the U.S. dipped sharply minutes after the outage hit almost exactly a month after a cyberattack that caused the operator of the largest fuel pipeline in the U.S to halt its operations. READ MORE
