Social media, news sites hit by outage

London: Numerous websites were unavailable on Tuesday after an apparent widespread outage at the cloud service company Fastly. Dozens of high-traffic websites, including the New York Times, CNN, Twitch and the UK government’s home page, could not be reached.

London, June 8: Multiple websites went offline briefly across the globe on Tuesday morning after an outage at 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 websites, Twitch, Reddit, the Guardian, and the UK government’s home page, could not be reached.

All major future markets in the US dipped sharply minutes after the outage hit, almost exactly a month after a cyberattack that caused the operator of the largest fuel pipeline in America to halt its operations.

When the outage hit, some visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.”” Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message, while visits to The New York Times and the UK government’s gov.uk site returned an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message, along with the line “Varnish cache server,” which is a technology that Fastly is built on.

In Asia, cities like Hong Kong and Singapore were affected, with users unable to access the CNN website. Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, said, “There may be a widespread outage at Fastly.” 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.”

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.”

Fastly said it had identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions, meaning the outage appeared to be caused internally.

A number of sites that were hit appeared to be coming back online after the issue was resolved.

Internet traffic measurement by Kentik show that Fastly began to recover from the outage roughly an hour after it struck at mid-morning European time, and before most Americans were awake.

“Looks like it is slowly coming back,” said Doug Madory, an internet infrastructure expert at Kentik.

He added it is serious because Fastly is one of the world’s biggest contentdelivery network and this was a global outage. It provides vital but behind-thescenes cloud computing “edge servers” to many of the web’s popular sites. These servers store, or “cache” content such as images and video in places around the world so they are closer to users, allowing them to fetch it more quickly and smoothly instead of having to access the site’s original server. Fastly says its services mean that a European user going to an American website can get the content 200 to 500 milliseconds faster.

The impact of Fastly's trouble highlights the relative fragility of the internet’s current architecture.