The outage by Fastly, a content-delivery network, shows websites’ reliance on a handful of big technology firms
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Websites across the internet were temporarily unavailable on Tuesday, including the New York Times, Bloomberg News, Reddit Inc., and the U.K. government, after services from content-delivery network Fastly Inc. went down.
Fastly, which runs a content-delivery network to push data quickly around the internet, said that it had identified the issue that caused a global outage of its services at 11:44 a.m. London time, about an hour after it first disclosed the issue, and was implementing a fix. Several of the websites that had been down became available again soon after Fastly’s statement.
The fault shows the reliance that the most popular pages on the internet have on a handful of big technology firms to help them distribute content and host users. Fastly’s technology is one of a handful that act as a high-level website and application hosting service that large enterprises use to serve content to millions of users simultaneously.
Rather than hosting all website content on a single set of servers in one location, Fastly puts cloud infrastructure in dozens of locations to let people download from a server closest to them.
A representative for Fastly didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Down Detector, a website that tracks service outages across the internet, reported spikes in user-reported issues with websites from Amazon and Spotify to Twitch, Shopify and Etsy on Tuesday.