[Updated] Multiple Major Websites Start to Return After Outage

LONDON – A number of major websites around the world went dark Tuesday morning. The outage affected the likes of Amazon, Reddit, CNN, The New York Times, and BBC News, amongst others. The UK Government’s website was also hit.
Major Websites Around the World Offline
Some sites – the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and even Apple.com stayed working. The cause of the outage was not apparent at the time. We will update this story as the situation develops. The website affected displayed a message reading: “Error 503 Service Unavailable.” The outage of the UK government website came on the first day those under aged 25-29 could book a COVID-19 vaccine through the gov.uk service.
[Update – 11.45 AM BST/6.45 AM EDT (time zone corrected)]
Many of the sites that faced outages now appear to be returning.
[Update 4:45 PM EDT] What Happened?
The issue centered around Fastly. The cloud computing service experienced an outrage, AP reported. The company publicly acknowledged the problem at 6 AM EDT, and announced that the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied” an hour later. It insisted there was a “technical issue” not a “cyber attack.” Indeed, an incident report from Fastly says:
Fastly has observed recovery of all services and has resolved this incident. Customers could continue to experience a period of increased origin load and lower Cache Hit Ratio (CHR).
Tags: internet, Internet Access