Several social media platforms, streaming services, and global news outlets — including HBO Max, Hulu, the New York Times and CNN — were hit early Tuesday by outages, blocking hundreds of visitors from being able to access the sites.
Confused internet users were instead greeted by error messages that read “Error 503 Service Unavailable,” or “connection failure.”
The websites that could not be reached also included Reddit, Twitter, Spotify, Target, Google, and the United Kingdom’s government website, according to downdetector, an online platform that provides realtime information about the status of websites and services.
The global glitch was caused by an outage at the cloud computing service, Fastly. The San Francisco-based company operates a content delivery network service that many websites use to help speed up the loading of their web pages.
Fastly first acknowledged a problem just before 6 a.m.
“We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” the company wrote on its website at 5:58 a.m.
By 7 a.m. it said the issue had been addressed.
“The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” Fastly added at 6:57 a.m.
But David Vaskevitch, the former chief technical officer of Microsoft, said the outage underscores how interconnected — and thus vulnerable — online systems are.
He likened it to the power grid, where one downed transformer can shut down power supply to whole towns or cities.
“What this really means is you always have to have in the back of your mind, ‘Yes, I’m going to depend on the internet, but what am I going to do if it’s not there,’” he said.
Vaskevitch pointed out that there aren’t many major content delivery network providers — likely fewer than 25, he said.
When one goes down, he added, that means many websites will likely be affected.
“I hope it doesn’t happen again, but I know it will.”
Meanwhile, social media users — who could access Twitter — poked fun at the situation.
“Have you tried turning it off and then turning it on again?,” @Mixta quipped.
“Not so much Fastly, more like Slowly, eh!,” @magawk joined in.
Another joked he was responsible for the glitch, tweeting, “Me on my first day at #Fastly: What does this button do?” alongside a gif of a clumsy forklift driver causing shelves to come crashing down in a warehouse.
Others struck a more dramatic tone, with one social media commentator calling the outage an “internet apocalypse.”
Article source : https://nypost.com/2021/06/08/social-media-news-sites-including-cnn-new-york-times-hit-by-outage/