JUNE 8, 2021
Numerous websites were rendered unavailable on Tuesday morning after an apparent widespread outage at the cloud service company Fastly. Dozens of high-traffic websites including CBSNews.com, the New York Times, CNN, Twitch and the U.K. government’s home page, could not be reached for almost an hour, with outages lingering for some sites.
San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 6 a.m. Eastern time. It said in repeated updates on its website that it was “continuing to investigate the issue.”
Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, said: “Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service.”
Fastly, which is publicly traded, runs a so-called Content Delivery Network, or CDN, used by many media outlets and other websites to provide multimedia content to users. It was an outage in some part of the widespread CDN that crippled Fastly’s client sites on Tuesday.
“This morning it looked like the entire internet was down,” said CBS News technology reporter Dan Patterson. He said the fact that most affected sites were showing “Error 503” messages was an early indicator that a network error was behind the outages, rather than a hack.
“We wouldn’t see this one Error 503 everywhere” if it was a hack, Patterson said, suggesting it was more likely a “misconfiguration of some sort.”
Fastly told CBS News that the “issue has been identified and a fix is underway,” and the affected sites were slowly coming back online. Patterson said service would likely be patchy for users in different regions as the issue was fully resolved.
As of 9 a.m. Eastern, only a handful users of several sites that appeared to have been affected by the outage, including Hulu, Reddit and Twitch, were reporting problems, according to Down Detector.
Courtesy/Source: CBS News
