A major worldwide outage on Tuesday hitting social media sites, streaming services, Amazon, government and news sites such as the New York Times left social media users joking about an “internet apocalypse.”
Some visitors trying to reach the unavailable sites were greeted with error messages that read “Error 503 Service Unavailable.” Others simply received a “connection failure” timeout.
Outage tracker Downdetector.com listed many high traffic sites as being down, including Reddit, Amazon, HBO Max, Hulu, CNN, Paypal, Spotify, Google, Target and the New York Times, reported CBC News.
The UK’s attorney general Michael Ellis tweeted that his country’s main gov.uk website was down. And reportedly nearly 21,000 Reddit users were unable to access the social media site.
For now, it is not clear exactly what caused the massive outage. Evidence points to an issue at San Francisco-based cloud computing provider, Fastly.
According to the New York Post, the company announced early Tuesday that was was having a technical issue that was being investigated.
Fastly runs a major content delivery network service used internationally by websites to speed up load times for users.
“Fastly, the CDN provider, is having a massive outage, resulting in Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit, The Guardian, and the FT returning 503 errors,” tweeted Matt Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times.
The technical problem has been now been resolved, according to Fastly.
“The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied,” Fastly stated at 6:57 a. m. on Tuesday. “Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”