Amazon, GitHub and the UK government’s online portal were among countless websites taken offline by the outage of cloud computing provider Fastly.
The outage, which started just before 11am on Tuesday, impacted a variety of websites, ranging from governmental portals and news outlets to IT and code-hosting services.
Among those which have been affected are payment websites PayPal and Shopify, internet forums Quora and Reddit, streaming sites Spotify, Twitch, Hulu, HBO Max, and Vimeo, and developer portals GitHub and Stack Overflow.
The Fastly outage has also taken down gov.uk, as well as numerous online newspapers and news outlets. These include the New York Times, BBC, Financial Times, CNN, the Guardian, Bloomberg News, and The Verge, with the latter opting to take its reporting onto Google Docs.
The precise number of affected sites is at this time unknown. Fastly reportedly has 2,084 paying customers who could all be impacted by the outage. The average Fastly customer reportedly spends $136,000 (£96,125) per year.
The gov.uk Twitter account stated that it’s “aware of the issues with http://GOV.UK which means that users may not be able to access the site”.
“This is a wider issue affecting a number of other non-government sites. We are investigating this as a matter of urgency,” it added.
On its status information site, Fastly described the issue as a “global CDN disruption”, noting that it’s “currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services”. Fastly’s own website was also down, displaying an “I/O error” message, while other websites showed a “503 error“.
At 11:44 am BST, the company announced that it had identified the issue and that “a fix [was] being implemented.
A Fastly spokesperson told IT Pro that the company “identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions” across its POPs “globally” and has since “disabled that configuration”.
“Our global network is coming back online,” they added.
Gov.uk’s services were brought back shortly after Fastly’s announcement, and most of the affected sites appeared to come back online at around noon BST.