Global Internet Outage Hits CNN, New York Times, UK Govt , Social Media, Websites

LAGOS JUNE 8^TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Social media, streaming services and global news outlets including the New York Times and CNN were hit Tuesday by outages, with some users unable to access the sites.

Some visitors to the affected websites received error messages that read, “Error 503 Service Unavailable,” while others read simply, “connection failure.”

The United Kingdom’s government website, gov.UK, was also affected by the outage.

It’s unclear what caused the sweeping outages, but it appears to be related to major problems with a cloud service provider.

San Francisco-based cloud computing services provider Fastly announced early Tuesday that it’s experiencing a technical issue. The firm said on its website that it’s investigating the issue.

Fastly operates a content delivery network service that many websites use to help speed up the loading of their web pages for users.

Matt Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times, wrote on Twitter: “Fastly, the CDN provider, is having a massive outage, resulting in Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit, The Guardian, and the FT returning 503 errors.” According to downdetector, Reddit, Amazon, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon Web Services, Etsy, Twitter, Google, Target, Spotify and others were all affected.

Cloud computing services provider Fastly announced early Tuesday that it’s experiencing a technical issue. The firm said on its website that it’s investigating the issue.

“Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service,” downdetector said on its site.

Downdetector’s site showed that the issues had largely subsided by 7:20 a.m. ET.

The Post has reached out to representatives for several downed sites.

“The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” Fastly said at 6:44 a.m. ET.

“The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied,” Fastly added at 6:57. “Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”

We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online. Continued status is available at https://t.co/RIQWX0LWwl

— Fastly (@fastly) June 8, 2021

David Vaskevitch, the former chief technical officer of Microsoft, said the outage underscores how interconnected, and thus vulnerable, online systems are. He likened it to the power grid, where one downed transformer can shut down power supply to whole towns or cities. 

“What this really means is you always have to have in the back of your mind, ‘Yes, I’m going to depend on the internet, but what am I going to do if it’s not there,’” he said.

He added that there aren’t many major content delivery network providers, adding that it’s likely fewer than 25. When one goes down, he added, that means many websites will likely be affected.

“I hope it doesn’t happen again, but I know it will.”

Social media users quickly joked about the sweeping outage. User @DarthMewtwo posted a meme questioning how one company’s outage could ripple throughout so much of the internet. 

Me on my first day at #Fastly: What does this button do?

The internet: pic.twitter.com/IYYEbDEC0n

— Mark the Blogger (He/him) (@MarktheBlogger1) June 8, 2021

Others joked about starting their first day of work at Fastly on Tuesday. User @_BillieBelieves wrote, “Just trying to log in for my first day as Fastly’s Head of PR Keep getting an error when I try, maybe HR haven’t set me up yet?”

Another user called it an “internet apocalypse,” while another said “everything just shut out of nowhere.” 

“Me on my first day at #Fastly: What does this button do?” wrote user @MarktheBlogger1 along with a gif of a forklift crashing.

New York Times

Short URL: https://newsrangers.com/?p=71348