(ETH) – Major media and government websites, including the White House, New York Times, Reddit, and Amazon were temporarily down on Tuesday after being hit by a global outage blamed on a glitch from cloud computing services provider Fastly.
The widespread outages around 1000 GMT also hit the UK government website, CNN, and the BBC before resuming services more than an hour later. “Error 503 Service Unavailable” and “connection failure” messages appeared on several websites, later blamed on a problem at San Francisco-based firm Fastly, which scrambled to restore sites.
The company offers a service to websites around the world to speed up loading time for websites. It competes with rivals such as Akamai and Cloudflare, which handle hundreds of billions of requests every day, playing a key role in global internet access. Fastly’s clients span the globe, and include Deliveroo, Pinterest and Shazam, with a turnover of $291 million last year alone.
The firm said in a tweet after the outages that “the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.” It later confirmed “our global network is coming back online”, as service was restored on most sites. READ MORE
