Social media, news websites hit by major internet outage

A widespread internet outage has affected some of the world’s biggest internet services, including Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitch and Reddit.

Websites including gov.uk, the Guardian, BBC and New York Times have been affected. In addition, services such as Stack Overflow, GitHub, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo and Shopify have also been impacted by the outage as per a Tech Crunch report.

The source of the error seems to be a glitch at CDN (Content Delivery Network) provider Fastly, as per reports.

Major websites facing outage are returning nearly 503 errors, as per the report, with Fastly appearing in some of them. According to an Engadget report, while some websites are returning 503 errors, only images are affected on sites such as Twitter and Amazon.

Fastly on its status page has confirmed that it is facing an outage.

“We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” it said at around 09:58 UTC (3:28 pm IST).

Fastly at around 4:14 pm IST (10:44 UTC) said that it had identified the issue and a fix was being implemented.

The outage has impacted websites across the globe. In India, it has impacted services in Chennai, Mumbai and New Delhi.

CDNs are an important aspect of the internet infrastructure. CDNs act as proxy servers where companies can cache certain data closer to the end-user to offer better services.

As noted by TechCrunch, Fastly is popular with many media majors.

Globally, the incident has affected various cities in the Asia Pacific, South America, Europe, Noth America and South Africa. TheHinduBusinessLine