A massive internet outage has suddenly hit websites like IGN, Amazon, Twitch, and The Guardian due to a failure in a content delivery network by Fastly.
Sites across the internet have been offline for the past hour thanks to the Fastly failure, with some like Amazon and Twitch coming back intermittently. From 11am onwards, users were met with "Error 503 Service Unavailable" and "connection failure" message across many websites.
Sites affected by the Fastly outage
- IGN
- The Guardian
- BBC
- Amazon
- Twitch
- The Verge
- GameSpot
- UK Government
- Independent
- Spotify
The reason behind the internet outage is due to Fastly, a cloud computing services provider that many of the sites use. Fastly runs an "edge cloud" which speeds up loading times and helps keep traffic under control, as well as protecting from denial-of-service attacks.
Because of how Fastly works by sitting between the site and users, the service going offline could potentially take the site down altogether and prevent access, which is what has happened today. When the outages were reported, Fastly said, "We're currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services".
Some of the sites have managed to come back by moving their services away from Fastly whilst it is down. This hasn't fixed every site though, as some are coming in and out of service, like Twitch.
At the time of writing, more and more services are coming back, although Fastly's status page still has a warning sign on it and the note that the team is still investigating the matter.
Websites like Amazon and Twitch have started to come back, although some are still seeing spotty connection errors across the board. Amazon seems mostly stable now, but Twitch isn't fully online just yet and has seen connection failures. Other websites like The Guardian are still seeing the "connection failure" message and haven't come online yet. This will likely be fixed in the next couple of hours as more sites swap over from Fastly.