San Francisco – Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were coming back online on Tuesday, after getting hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to United States-based cloud company, Fastly Inc.
High traffic sites, including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times went down, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
They came back up after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.
“Our global network is coming back online,” Fastly said.
One of the world’s most widely-used cloud-based content delivery network providers, the company earlier reported a disruption from a “service configuration” and did not explain.
“Incidents like this underline the fragility of the internet and its dependence on a patchwork of fragmented technology,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight said. “Ironically, this also underlines its inherent strength and how quickly it can recover.
“The fact that an outage like this can grab headlines around the world shows how rare it is.”
Fastly, which went public two years ago and has a market capitalisation of under U.S. $6 billion, is far smaller than peers such as Amazon’s AWS.
The company’s content delivery network helps websites move content using less-congested routes, enabling them to reach consumers faster.
(Reuters)
