A massive worldwide internet outage has impacted major websites including Amazon, the New York Times, CNN, Reddit, Twitter, and Twitch.
The sites’ content delivery network, U.S.-based Fastly, announced that the issue has been identified and a “fix is being implemented,” and many of the sites initially impacted by the outage appeared to have been restored within an hour’s time.
What are the details?
The company confirmed a “global disruption,” according to
Engadget, and began investigating the issue in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Other affected sites, the outlet reported, included Al Jazeera Media Network, GitHub, Gov.uk, HBO Max, Hulu, PayPal, Shopify, Stack Overflow, Quora, Vimeo, and more.
Down Detector, a website that tracks internet outages, reported that other sites such as Etsy and Reddit were also impacted by the issue.
Reuters
reported that Fastly’s website stated that most of its coverage areas faced “Degraded Performance,” and myriad error messages across impacted websites pointed to Fastly’s CDN as the issue.
“News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the widespread outage when their websites failed to load up,” Reuters noted. “Popular tech website The Verge took to Google Docs to report news, while [a] U.K. Technology Editor at The Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the problems.”
After its website returned to a functioning level,
CNN reported that the outage impacted “dozens of countries” across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, as well as South Africa.
Many websites, CNN reported, continued to be unavailable for users as of 7 a.m. ET while the company worked to improve load times for its apps, platforms, and websites.
Market effects
Fastly stock (FSLY), +7.17%, took a hit during the outage, but pared its losses after it issued a fix.
According to MarketWatch’s Tomi Kilgore, shares took a 1.7% hit in premarket trading on Tuesday.
The stock, however, pared earlier losses of as much as 5.5% after the company suffered the outage. According to Kilgore’s report, Fastly’s stock “tumbled 42.0% year to date, while the S&P 500 SPX, -0.08% has gained 12.5%.”