Main web sites down worldwide after cloud outage at San Francisco-based firm | Information

LONDON – Several major websites went offline briefly on Tuesday after an apparent outage at cloud service provider Fastly, and there were still reports of sporadic disruptions after the company fixed the problem about an hour later.

Dozens of websites, including the New York Times, CNN, Twitch, Reddit, the Guardian and the UK government website, were down.

Fastly of San Francisco confirmed a problem just before 1000 GMT. Repeated updates to its website stated that “the issue is still being investigated”.

About an hour later, the company said, “The problem has been identified and a solution has been applied. Customers may experience an increased origin load when global services return.”

A number of websites that were affected early appeared to be back online.

Some visitors trying to access CNN.com received a message that said, “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.” Attempts to access the Financial Times website returned a similar message during visits to the The New York Times website and the UK government website gov.uk returned the message “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 suggest that Fastly may be experiencing a widespread outage that can affect your service.”

Fastly describes itself as an “edge cloud platform”. so users can get them faster and smoother instead of having to access the site’s original server.

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