Major websites and platforms around the world were unavailable for many users on Tuesday morning, including Amazon, CNN, Hulu, Reddit, the New York Times, and the U.K. government. The outage, which lasted around an hour, appears to stem from the content-delivery network Fastly. The company said at 6:57 a.m. that it had identified the issued and “a fix has been applied,” though users “may experience increased origin load as global services return.”
Fastly is used by many websites to improve speed an reliability. As the New York Times explained:
Fastly works on technology known as a content delivery network, which is a highly distributed network of servers used to reduce the distance between a server and user, and increase the speed at which a website loads.
The technology is thought to improve reliability because it distributes the delivery of a website to many locations, rather than depending on a central data center. Fastly did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
The sites affected by the glitch also include BBC, Bloomberg News, the Financial Times, the Guardian, eBay, Etsy, HBOMax, Hulu, Le Monde, Squarespace, Giphy, Paypal, Pinterest, Spotify, Target, TechRadar, Twitch, The Verge, and Vimeo.
