This story was updated at 10:28 a.m. on June 8, 2021.
It wasn’t just your internet.
A global outage Tuesday morning brought down major websites like Amazon, Target, CNN, Reddit, Twitch and a host of the internet’s other most popular sites and platforms. The U.K. government’s homepage also went down.
DownDetector, which tracks internet outages, showed a spike in reports of outages on websites using San Francisco-based cloud computing services provider Fastly, which repeatedly reported a widespread failure early Tuesday.
At just before 7 a.m. Eastern, Fastly said, “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.” Some of the sites that went dark then started coming back to life.
Fastly said it had identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions, meaning the outage appeared to be caused internally. Brief internet service outages are not uncommon and are only rarely the result of hacking or other mischief.
Still, major futures markets in the U.S. dipped sharply minutes after the outage, which came a month after a cyberattack forced the shutdown of the biggest fuel pipeline in the U.S.
Fastly is a content-delivery network, or CDN. It provides vital but behind-the-scenes cloud computing “edge servers” to many of the web’s popular sites. These servers store, or “cache,” content such as images and video in places around the world so that it is closer to users, allowing them to fetch it more quickly and smoothly.
Fastly says its services mean that a European user going to an American website can get the content 200 to 500 milliseconds faster.
Amazon, Target, Reddit, Twitch, the British government’s site, and the websites of major news outlets such as CNN, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times and The Verge all went down around 5:30 a.m. Tuesday.
Around an hour later, user reports of issues started to spike at DownDetector.
Other sites and services that users reported issues with Tuesday morning included Spotify, Hulu, eBay, GitHub, Vimeo, Stack Overflow, Fubo, HBO Max and Shopify, according to DownDetector. It was unclear how many of those reports were related to Fastly’s issues.
When the outage hit, some visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.” Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message, while visits to The New York Times and U.K. government’s gov.uk site returned an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message, along with the line “Varnish cache server,” which is a technology that Fastly is built on.
????️ The issue limiting users' access to Twitch has now been resolved. Thank you for your patience ????
— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) June 8, 2021
Breaking: the internet. Huge parts of the web are currently offline, including Reddit, Twitch, and (regrettably) The Verge. We'll keep you posted ????
— The Verge (@verge) June 8, 2021
Twitter was not seriously affected by the outage, so internet users with nowhere else to turn tweeted their thoughts.
everybody coming to twitter to see if everyone else is getting error 503 pic.twitter.com/oAgflI9UPU
— Shazam???? (@fadeshazam) June 8, 2021
The Internet just broke down #fastly pic.twitter.com/iHlVilckeI
— Arthur Ehlinger (@ArthurEhlinger) June 8, 2021
Reddit is down.
— SVM (@ShivamChatak) June 8, 2021
Twitch is down
Amazon is down
Stackoverflow is down
PayPal is down
Vimeo is down
Spotify is down
AWS is down
eBay is down
Shopify is down
PANIC pic.twitter.com/hNqUt3evPeThe internet is broken. People look up from their computers. The sky is blue and the sun is bright. It's awful. Everyone clicks refresh.
— Dave (@davechannel) June 8, 2021
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
First Published: June 8, 2021, 10:21 a.m.
Updated: June 8, 2021, 2:31 p.m.
