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Major Websites Around The World Down Following Server Issue

Major Websites Around The World Down Following Server Issue

Tech Crunch reports that, according to a product manager at the Financial Times, an apparent glitch at Fastly is throught to be the reason

Jess Hardiman

Jess Hardiman

A number of major websites around the world - including Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, and several news outlets - are currently down following a server issue.

Webites affected also include The Guardian, The Financial Times and The New York Times, along with the UK's government website gov.uk, which gives the error message 'Error 503 Service Unavailable'.

Tech Crunch reports that, according to a product manager at the Financial Times, an apparent glitch at Fastly is thought to be the reason.

The US firm has confirmed it is 'currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services'.

Service monitoring website Down Detector registered a spike in resports of outages of Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud computing platform. As of 11am today, the site recorded 1,700 reports.

Down Detector

Reporting the various issues on Twitter, one person wrote: "What's happening... Twitch down. Reddit down. Amazon down. Audible down. Did the the AWS servers just get melted?!"

Another said: "Went to Reddit, found the '503 Service Unavailable' error. First thought was, 'ah s***, they banned this before Twitter?' Immediately hopped to Twitter only to see your tweet about it being a global outage!"

Alex Hern, Technology Editor at The Guardian - one of the affected sites - also tweeted to say that Fastly 'has been identified as the cause of the problem'.

He said: "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'.

"As well as bringing down some websites entirely, the failure also broke specific sections of other services, such as the servers for Twitter that host the social network's emoji.

PA

"Fastly, a cloud computing services provider, has been identified as the cause of the problem. The company runs an 'edge cloud', which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic.

"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."

Hern also quoted an error message from Fastly, posted at 10.58am UK time, which said it was investigating the issue.

He added that some sites 'including the BBC', have managed to restore services by 'switching their systems away from Fastly's network', while others have had 'patchy uptime'.

A spokesperson for Fastly told LADbible in a statement: "We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration.

"Our global network is coming back online.

"Continued status is available at https://status.fastly.com/incidents/vpk0ssybt3bj."

Featured Image Credit: PA