LONDON – Numerous websites were temporarily unavailable on Tuesday morning after an apparently widespread failure at the cloud service provider Fastly.
Dozens of high traffic websites including the New York Times, CNN, Twitch, Hulu, HBO Max and the UK government homepage could not be reached. According to Down Detector, a website that tracks internet issues, Reddit had received more than 20,000 reports of problems loading the app and website.
San Francisco-based Fastly admitted a “service configuration problem” and said in repeated updates to its website that it was “continuing to investigate” and work on a solution.
The problem appeared to be resolved at around 4 a.m. PDT Tuesday.
Visitors who previously tried to access CNN.com received a message that said, “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.”
Attempts to access the Financial Times website resulted in a similar message, while visits to the New York Times website and the UK government website gov.uk received “Error 503 Service Unavailable” along with the line “Varnish Cache Server” which is a technology on which Fastly is built.
Down Detector, tracking internet outages, said, “Reports are suggesting that there may be a widespread outage at Fastly that could affect your service.”
Fastly describes itself as an “edge cloud platform”. It provides vital behind the scenes cloud computing services to many of the high profile websites on the internet by helping them store or “cache” content on servers around the world so they are closer to users.
KTVU contributed to this report.
