June 08, (THEWILL)- The websites of the White House, the British government and international media firms were hit by outages on Tuesday.
Leading media websites including CNN, The Guardian, Financial Times, Independent, New York Times, Evening Standard and France’s Le Monde newspaper, were also among those giving error messages.
Social media sites like Reddit and video streaming service Twitch and Amazon reportedly could also not be reached.
The outage meant some websites went down completely, while others experienced smaller disruption and were still able to operate.
The White House website had an error message but was available again later.
The gov.uk websites remained unavailable at around 10:30 am GMT.
The BBC and the New York Times were temporarily inaccessible, but also later returned.
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.
Downdetector, which tracks internet outages, said: “Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service.”
Alex Hern, the Guardian’s Yechnology Editor, tweeted that Fastly had “been identified as the cause of the problem.”
At least some of these outages occurred due to an apparent widespread outage at the cloud service company Fastly, The Associated Press said.
Tech experts said there is no evidence the outage was caused by malicious activity. Instead, it appeared to have been sparked by an issue with Fastly, one of the world’s major content delivery networks (CDNs).
The company offers services such as speeding up loading times for websites, protecting them from denial-of-service cyberattacks and helping them deal with bursts of traffic in order to stay online and stable.
Fastly reported a major outage across its global network, which is believed to have caused the outage.
The San Francisco-based US firm acknowledged a problem just before 10:00 am GMT. It said in repeated updates on its website that it was “currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services”.
A CDN is a system used to host websites and their content on the internet and serve it to users.
It later said: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.
“The outage, which began shortly before 11am UK time, saw visitors to a vast array of sites receive error messages including ‘Error 503 Service Unavailable’ and a terse ‘connection failure’.”
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