Thousands of websites across the globe were taken offline last night due to a widespread hour-long outage linked to a US-based cloud company named Fastly Inc. The outage affected high-traffic sites such as Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network, and the New York Times. The sites were able to relaunch after outages that ranged from just a few minutes to an hour. The outage also affected government and social media sites, including the UK’s main gov.uk website, according to the country’s attorney general.
Fastly released a statement when the issue was resolved. The company is one of the world’s most widely-used cloud-based content delivery network providers. Fastly went public in 2019 and has a market cap of more than $5 billion, smaller than counterparts such as Amazon AWS. The disruption may have also caused issues for citizens booking Covid-19 vaccinations of reporting test results, says the Financial Times. Fastly stated that the websites that experienced outages faced an issue called degraded performance, but it does not seem as though the outage has any links to malicious activity such as a cyberattack.
Read More: Websites rumble back to life after Fastly-linked outage
