After around an hour of downtime, some websites appeared to be gradually coming back online shortly before midday, but with slow loading times. The problem was caused by the US firm Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN) company which helps users view website content more quickly. The aim of CDNs is to reduce latency – the delay from the moment a user makes a request to the exact instant they receive a response. The higher the latency, the worse the user experience.
But if the service suffers a failure, as Fastly's did today, it prevents the companies that use it from operating on the net at all. Many of the world's biggest websites run on the 'edge cloud' platform's network, hence the mass outage. Fastly first posted an error message at 10.58 BST (05.58 ET), saying it was 'investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services'.
It later tweeted shortly after midday UK time: 'We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. 'Our global network is coming back online.'
The outage saw visitors to a vast array of sites receive error messages including 'Error 503 Service Unavailable' and 'connection failure.' Streaming sites Netflix, Twitch and Hulu were also hit by the problem. Some sites including the UK government website were offline entirely, while others such as Twitter had more specific errors, such as not showing emojis.
Travelling Britons revealed their frustration this morning at not being able to complete their passenger locator form because the Gov.UK website was down.
Countless popular websites have been affected by the issues, including:
- Amazon
- Spotify
- Netflix
- gov.uk
- PayPal
- Twitch
- Stack Overflow
- GitHub
- Hulu
- HBO Max
- Quora
- Vimeo
- Shopify
- Stripe
- CNN
- The Guardian
- The New York Times
- BBC
- Financial Times
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