Massive internet glitch hits major media, government websites

Multiple outages have hit social media, government and news websites across the globe, due to a glitch at US-based cloud computing services provider Fastly.

High traffic websites including Reddit, Amazon, Paypal and Spotify were listed as experiencing problems on Tuesday morning by outage tracking website Downdetector.com, although several appeared to be coming back up.

The United Kingdom's attorney general tweeted that the country's main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.

The White House website also had an error message but was available again later. 

Websites operated by news outlets including CNN, Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, The BBC, Bloomberg News and France's Le Monde newspaper also faced outages.

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Fastly issue

Fastly, one of the world's most widely-used content delivery network providers acknowledged a problem just before 1000 GMT. It said in repeated updates on its website that it was “continuing to investigate the issue."

About an hour later, the company said: "The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return."

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 them to store, or “cache,” content in servers around the world so that it's closer to users.

Earlier, most of Fastly's coverage areas were facing "Degraded Performance", the company's website showed.

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News, social media effected

Some 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 UK 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.

Nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to Downdetector.com.

Amazon's Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector's website.

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