The BBC, the New York Times, Reddit, Twitch, and more high-profile websites experienced global downtime after website service provider Fastly, which is based in San Francisco crashed.
The outage lasted for approximately 60 minutes with most websites back and fully operational.
Users reported receiving “Error 503 Service Unavailable” pages when attempting to log on to a number of websites while others received a “fastly error” saying the domain of a significant website such as Freelancer was “unknown”.
Fastly, the CDN provider, is having a massive outage, resulting in Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit, The Guardian, and the FT returning 503 errors.https://t.co/parKGKwrSU
— Matt 'TK' Taylor (@MattieTK) June 8, 2021
Fastly, a popular CDN provider has confirmed it’s facing an outage on its status website.
“We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” the firm said.
Content delivery networks (CDNs) run global networks of servers to improve the performance and availability of web services. CDNs act as proxy servers and cache some data as close to the end-user as possible.
Countless popular websites including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC, and Financial Times all experienced the outage.