A large number of major websites, including New Scientist , were offline for about one hour on Tuesday morning in a widespread outage associated with a respected internet content delivery service.
US firm Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN) that helps websites speed up loading times and present their content to users, confirmed at 10.58 am BST it had been looking into a concern that had a “potential impact to performance with this CDN services”.
The issue were resolved just before 12 noon UK time. “The problem has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” Fastly said on its service status website.
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The UK government’s website and the web discussion platform Reddit were among those that returned “Error 503” messages through the outage. Numerous media outlets were also affected, including The Guardian , Financial Times , The Independent and THE BRAND NEW York Times .
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Many of the afflicted websites reported that the problem was linked to Fastly. Alex Hern, The Guardian ’s technology editor, tweeted that Fastly “has been discovered as the cause of the problem”. Quartz also attributed the problem to Fastly in a Twitter post.
Fastly offers services such as accelerating loading times for websites, protecting them from denial-of-service cyberattacks and helping them manage bursts of traffic to be able to stay online and stable.
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