Major websites restored after global CDN provider Fastly crashes
A number of high-profile websites including the BBC, the New York Times, Reddit, the Sydney Morning Herald and Twitch went offline on Tuesday evening during a mass web outage.
The outage is connected to a San Francisco-based website service provider named Fastly and lasted for about an hour.
At 8.44pm AEST, Fastly reported it had identified the issue and a fix was being implemented.
Fastly is one of four companies that provide CDN (Content Delivery Network) services to some of the internet’s biggest sites.
Because of the nature of CDNs, which involve servers located in multiple locations, not every website that was impacted will immediately come back online.
Users had reported receiving “Error 503 Service Unavailable” pages when attempting to log on to a number of websites.
Others received a “fastly error” saying the domain of a significant website such as the BBC was “unknown”.
Fastly describes itself as an “edge cloud platform.” It provides vital behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web’s high-profile sites, by helping them to store, or “cache,” content in servers around the world so that it’s closer to users.
The outage impacted a number of Australian websites, including 9Now, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Some of the websites hit by major web outage:
- 9Now
- SMH
- CNN
- Age
- Gov.uk
- NY Times
- Twitch
- The Guardian
- AFR
- BBC
- Financial Times
