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Fri, Mar

Massive Global Internet Outages Hits Top Sites Like CNN, Reddit, Amazon, Google, Others

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Websites and apps around the globe went down on Tuesday morning, including government websites like Gov.UK, e-commerce websites like Target, and media websites like CNN and the New York Times. The outage affected a myriad of websites particularly around Europe, the Americans, Asia, and South Africa. Some of the high profile websites include Amazon, Reddit, and Twitch, PayPal, Shopify, BBC.com, HBO Max, Vimeo. The problem seems to be related to an outage at Fastly, a cloud service provider, which underpins a lot of websites. Fastly provider helps improve load times for websites and provides other services to internet sites, apps, and platforms, including a large global server network. The provider supports news sites and apps like CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times and many others. It also provides content delivery for Twitch, Pinterest, HBO Max, Hulu, Reddit, Spotify, and other services.

Fastly runs what is referred to as an "edge cloud", which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, as well as protect them from denial-of-service attacks and help them when traffic is peaking.

The firm said there were issues with its global content delivery network (CDN) and was implementing a fix. It says it has identified and fixed the issue but many websites continued to be unavailable for some users as of 7 a.m. ET.

"We identified a service configuration that triggered disruption across our POPs (points of presence) globally and has disabled that configuration, Fastly said in a statement.

"Our global network is coming back online."

Websites were also beginning to be restored, after around an hour of downtime.

Major website and app outages happen from time to time and typically don't last long, internet service providers, content delivery networks and other hosting services are built with multiple redundancies and a global network of backup servers designed to reduce disruptions when things go south.

 

 

 

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