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Disrupted websites return after outage at San Francisco cloud company, Fastly

Updated  June 8, 2021 7:30am PDT
Technology
Associated Press

Fastly outage affects major global websites

Fastly outage in San Francsci affects major global websites. James Torrez reports

LONDON - Numerous websites were temporarily unavailable Tuesday morning, after an apparent widespread outage at the cloud service company Fastly.

Dozens of high-traffic websites including the New York Times, CNN, Twitch, Hulu, HBO Max and the U.K. government's home page, could not be reached. Reddit had received more than 20,000 reports of issues loading both the app and website, according to Down Detector, a website that tracks internet issues. 

San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a "service configuration" problem and said in repeated updates on its website that it was "continuing to investigate the issue" and was working on a fix.

"We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration," the company said in a statement. "Our global network is coming back online. This was a technical issue triggered by a service configuration, and is not related to a cyber attack."

The issue seemed to have been resolved at about 4 a.m. PDT Tuesday.

The company acknowledged the outage on their blog Tuesday evening and characterized it as "broad and severe." However, they said within 49 minutes, 95% of its network was operating as normal. 

Visitors trying to access CNN.com earlier, received 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. 

Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, said: "Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service."

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.

KTVU contributed to this report.