Massive global internet outage hits top news, tech websites

Internet down news update: In a major development, several popular websites including leading news portals on Tuesday went off the grid globally, including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, GitHub, Hulu, HBO Max, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, the BBC, the Financial Times and more.

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In a massive internet outage, the technical glitch is likely to be from Fastly, a popular CDN provider. Fastly confirmed it was facing an outage on its status website. "Error 503 Service Unavailable," was the message that appeared on the affected websites.

A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. "We are continuing to investigate this issue. We're currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services," Fastly said. 

It was unclear if the glitch was due to a cyber-attack. Other popular websites affected were gov.uk, Quora, PayPal, Shopify and others. The UK Government website (gov.uk), was giving error message as well that reads “Error 503 Service Unavailable,” however, most of the websites were restored back to the usual track.

Some other websites that were affected by the outage include- eBay, Pinterest, Shopify, and Le Monde, the French newspaper. Service monitoring website Down Detector also registered a surge in reports of outages of Amazon’s cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services.

Reddit users took to the social media platform as well to report issues about Reddit. Nearly 21000 Reddit users complained about the outage, while 2,000 users reported issues with Amazon, as per Downdetector.com stats. Fastly is implementing a fix that (tentatively) seems to be allowing most sites to resume normal service.