THOUSANDS OF WEBSITES FACE GLOBAL OUTAGE

Several media, government and social media websites across the world suffered temporary outages on Tuesday morning due to a glitch in just one cloud computing service company

Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were coming back online on Tuesday after being hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to Us-based cloud company Fastly.

High traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times were out of commission. They came back up after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.

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

WHICH WEBSITES SAW OUTAGES?

Messages such as "ERROR 503 SERVICE UNAVAILABLE" and "CONNECTION FAILURE" appeared on the websites of the New York Times, CNN, the Financial Times, The Guardian, France's Le Monde newspaper; social and entertainment site Reddit; and government websites including the UK govt and the White House. Some sites that went down:

CLOUD PROVIDER ‘FASTLY’ ACKNOWLEDGES GLITCH

• The outage was traced to a failure in a content delivery network (CDN) run by cloud computing services provider Fastly. It said, “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.” Nearly an hour later, the company said it had identified the problem and was implementing a fix.

• A number of sites hit by the outage appeared to be coming back online shortly afterward.

• Fastly is a content delivery network that helps websites speed up loading times and present their content to users

WHY IT HAPPENED

Companies like Fastly route website traffic through their servers, which, if broken, create such outages. “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPS [points of presence] globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online,” the company said.

NOT A HACK

There were speculations on social media that the outage was the result of an attack, with #cyberattack trending on Twitter. However, the company clarified it was a configuration error.

WORKAROUNDS

The affected news sites came up with various ways to work around the outage. While several turned to liveblogs on Twitter, tech news site The Verge published news to a shared Google Doc, until a reporter accidentally shared a link on Twitter allowing the audience to edit it.