A global outage Tuesday morning shut down publications and websites including CNN, MSNBC, BBC and Reddit.
Other websites that were affected include Bloomberg News, The Guardian, The Financial Times and Amazon, according to NBC News. The United Kingdom’s government page was also temporarily shut down.
A content delivery network (CDN) run by Fastly, an American company that provides service to many websites, said in a status update at 5:58 a.m. EST on Tuesday morning that they were “investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.”
At 7:57 a.m. EST, the company said that a fix had been applied an hour ago and that “customers may continue to experience decreased cache hit ratio and increased origin load as global services return.” (RELATED: Microsoft Is Finally Killing One Of Its Most Iconic Products After 25 Years)
The Guardian stated in an update that its “website and app are currently being affected by a wider internet outage and will be back as soon as possible.”
“Some readers are currently unable to access” the New York Times’ website, the outlet posted in a Tweet. “We are looking into it and will send an update soon.”
Some readers are currently unable to access https://t.co/eMyFEYiHno. We are looking into it and will send an update soon.
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 8, 2021
The Guardian’s UK technology editor, Alex Hern, said in a Twitter thread that parts of other websites were inaccessible. In one such case, Twitter’s emoji servers were not working.
Fastly “runs an ‘edge cloud’, which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic,” according to Hern.
“That technology inherently requires Fastly to sit between most of its clients and their users, meaning that if the service suffers a catastrophic failure, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all.”
Some websites resorted to sharing news in an unconventional way. Hern reported that The Verge was using a Google Doc to share information since their site was down, however, the outlet reportedly forgot to turn off ‘editing’.
(This is a developing story. More information will be added as it becomes available.)