Several major websites and news portals, including Financial Times, The New York Times, Bloomberg News, BuzzFeed, CNN and BBC faced global outage on Tuesday, 8 June.
Reports of these mass outages were received from several parts of the world, including Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and India.
The cause for these disruptions was a glitch at Fastly, a US-based cloud computing services provider, which powers a major content delivery network (CDN).
A tweet from Fastly’s official handle read, “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online.”
What Is a CDN?
A content delivery network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers that works in tandem to quickly deliver internet content.
CDN improves web performance by caching data as close to the end user as possible, instead of the user needing to fetch data from the original server. The majority of web traffic the world over is routed through CDNs.
By 4:11 pm IST on Tuesday, The New York Times and BBC websites were restored and were working fine.
Following which, Fastly said, “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may continue to experience decreased cache hit ratio and increased origin load as global services return.”
All of Fastly’s geographies, they said, were suffering from “Degraded Performance”, which included the three stations hit in India.
The outage affected the UK government website, and British citizens faced difficulties in renewing passports, applying for tax allowances, or obtaining driving licences. The United Kingdom’s attorney general also tweeted that the country’s main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.
Other websites that faced technical problems were Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, Gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, The Guardian and Shopify.
A message reading "Error 503 Service Unavailable" was flashed on the impacted web pages.
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