UK government, Amazon, Financial Times included in those brought down temporarily
A vast internet outage took down some of the world’s most prominent websites, including those of the UK government, the Guardian and Amazon.
The failure was traced back to an error at the American cloud computing services company Fastly, who identified and amended the disruption.
In an error message posted at 10.58 in the UK, Fastly said: “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.”
Error messages first started to appear on people’s screens, including “Error 503 service unavailable” and “connection failure”, as early as 11am this morning.
Almost an hour later, Fastly declared the incident over. “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” the company said in a status update.
Over 20,000 Reddit users confirmed issues with the platform, while in excess of 2,000 users of Amazon raised issues with the online retailer’s website.
Other websites impacted were news organisations CNN, the New York Times and the Financial Times.
The outage didn’t seem to apply to everywhere in the world. While failures were reported in New Zealand, London and Texas, others, including Berlin, reported no issues at all.
“This global outage that affects many high-profile companies does highlight the dependency we have on cloud services and their availability,” said Sergio Loureiro, Cloud Security Director at Outpost24.
“This directly impacts many businesses, including for example Reddit whose entire business is based around their website.”