Numerous websites were unavailable Tuesday after an apparent widespread outage at the cloud service company Fastly a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Dozens of high-traffic websites including The New York Times, CNN, Twitch, Amazon, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and the United Kingdom government’s home page, could not be reached.
San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 10 a.m. GMT. It said in repeated updates on its website that it was “continuing to investigate the issue.”
“The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” it added about 45 minutes after the outages started.
The company later said all problems were fixed, though visitors to some sites might experience longer load times.
“Fastly has observed recovery of all services and has resolved this incident. Customers could continue to experience a period of increased origin load and lower Cache Hit Ratio,” it said.
Visitors trying to access CNN.com had been met with a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.”
Fastly provides content delivery networks, or groupings of servers that lets users connect faster to websites.
“That technology inherently requires Fastly to sit between most of its clients and their users, meaning that if the service suffers a catastrophic failure, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all,” according to Alex Hern, a technology editor at the Guardian.
The outages prompted the Guardian, the Verge, and some other websites to deliver updates on what was happening on Twitter, Google Docs, or other outside venues.
