Websites worldwide rumble back to life after Fastly-linked outage

San Francisco

GOVERNMENT, news and social media websites across the globe were hit on Tuesday by a widespread outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly Inc.

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 outage tracking website Downdetector.com, 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."

The company, which went public in 2019 and has a market capitalisation of US$5 billion, is far smaller than peers such as Amazon's AWS. It helps websites move content using less-congested routes, enabling them to reach consumers faster.

The United Kingdom's attorney-general earlier tweeted that the country's main gov.uk website was down, providing an e-mail for queries.

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

Fastly's website said that most of its coverage areas had faced "Degraded Performance". Error messages on several of the websites pointed to Fastly problems.

News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the widespread outage when their websites failed to load up.

Popular tech website The Verge took to Google Docs to report news, while UK Technology Editor at The Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the problems.

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

Amazon's Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector's website.

Websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times and Bloomberg News also faced outages.

There are many similarities between this outage and an issue with Cloudflare last year.

Cloudflare's problems arose because - in simple terms - the company's engineers tried to reroute Internet traffic, and everything exploded.

Both companies route website traffic through their servers. So when their servers break, so does everything else. These problems are also hard to prevent, and often happen when companies need to update their systems.

There is no evidence to suggest that Fastly's issues on Tuesday were the result of a malicious cyber attack.

Depending on the service level agreement signed between it and affected customers, Fastly may offer refunds or credit equivalent to the number of minutes a website was unavailable, according to its website. REUTERS, BLOOMBERG