(NewsNation Now) — Government, news and social media websites across the globe were coming back online Tuesday after being hit by a widespread outage linked to San Francisco-based cloud company Fastly Inc.
Dozens of high-traffic sites including the New York Times, CNN, some Amazon sites, Twitch, Reddit, the Guardian, and the U.K. government’s home page, could not be reached. Outages ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.
Fastly, one of the world’s most widely-used cloud based content delivery network providers, said “the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”
The company, which went public in 2019 and has a market capitalization of $5 billion, is far smaller than peers like Amazon’s AWS. It helps websites move content using less-congested routes, enabling them to reach consumers faster.
The United Kingdom’s attorney general tweeted that the country’s main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.
The disruption may have caused issues for citizens booking COVID-19 vaccinations or reporting test results, the Financial Times reported.
Earlier, most of Fastly’s coverage areas were facing “Degraded Performance”, the company’s website showed.
News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the widespread outage when their websites failed to load up.
Popular tech website the Verge took to Google Docs to report news, while UK Technology Editor at the Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the problems.
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.
Fastly provides vital but behind-the-scenes cloud computing “edge servers” to many of the web’s popular sites. These servers store, or “cache,” content such as images and video in places around the world so they are closer to users, allowing them to fetch it more quickly and smoothly instead of having to access the site’s original server. Fastly says its services mean that a European user going to an American website can get the content from 200 to 500 milliseconds faster.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report.