Social media platforms and government and news websites around the world experienced outages on Tuesday, with some reports indicating a technical issue at the American cloud computing company Fastly. The website "Downdetector.com," which monitors internet outages, listed several high-traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, and The New York Times among those experiencing problems, although many of them appeared to be returning to service.
The Attorney General of the United Kingdom tweeted that the main government website had gone down, including an email address for inquiries in his tweet. Fastly, one of the world's most widely used content delivery companies, stated, "We have identified the issue and are working on a fix." The company's website showed that most of its coverage areas experienced "performance degradation" earlier.
Around 21,000 users of the social media platform Reddit reported having issues, while over 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to Downdetector. The Danish television channel's second channel reported facing connectivity issues that day. The British newspaper "The Independent" noted that unanticipated outages had affected "Amazon," "the UK government," and "Reddit" across the globe.
The outage also affected news sites, including CNN, the Financial Times, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and The Guardian. Visitors to these sites were met with the message "Error 503 Service Unavailable." In a statement, the Associated Press reported that "the interruption of news sites resulted from a cloud computing company's outage." After approximately 30 minutes of downtime, the sites returned to near-normal operation, with Fastly stating that it was "working to resolve the issue impacting global sites."
