Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were coming back online on Tuesday after getting hit by a widespread hour-long …
Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were coming back online on Tuesday after getting hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to U.S.-based cloud company Fastly Inc. traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times went down, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. They came back after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour early in the morning in the United States but middle of the day in Europe. “Our global network is coming back online,” Fastly said. One of the world’s most widely-used cloud-based content delivery network providers, the company earlier reported a disruption from a “service configuration” and did not explain. “Incidents like this underline the fragility of the internet and its dependence on a patchwork of fragmented technology. Ironically, this also underlines its inherent strength and how quickly it can recover,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, said. “The fact that an outage like this can grab headlines around the world shows how rare it is.” Typical service configurations for a cloud service provider can include updating security rules to protect information, or instructing a server to refresh the contents of a news site before serving it to a customer, said Andy Champagne, senior vice president at Akamai, a cloud service company.
