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Rabat – Major news outlets and government websites went down this Tuesday after an internet outage caused a failure of the servers of Fastly, a content delivery company.
The outage took down news outlets such as The Guardian, the New York Times, WIRED, and many others. Reddit, Spotify, and other streaming websites such as Hulu were also affected.
The UK’s government and the White House websites both indicated “Error 503” and “This page doesn’t work” at around 10h20 GMT when users tried to connect.
The outage affected other major platforms, namely Target, Amazon, and PayPal. The internet outage lasted for about an hour and was restored at 11 GMT after Fastly said it had identified the problem that disrupted its servers.
In an email, the company reiterated that the shutdown was due to a “technical issue” and was “not related to a Cyberattack.”
The company also noted that some users might still experience difficulties accessing said websites until the problem is completely resolved. The disruption impacted countries across the world, including the Americas, Europe, South Africa, and Asia.
Fastly is an American-based cloud computing service provider and one of the largest content-delivery networks in the world. It assists developers by storing parts of the content in websites, apps, and servers, so they are close to users.
This means Fastly helps in shortening the time required for websites to load. Its services also prevent traffic jams that can take down a website through its extensive global network.
Because it depends on storing data in several locations instead of a centralized data center, this technology is meant to enhance security for websites that rely on it.
This is not the first time an internet outage has happened in recent months as there have been several similar incidents in the past year.
In December 2020, for example, Google’s network, including Youtube, Maps, and Gmail, stopped working, and the company identified “an authentication system outrage.”
In August of the same year, CenturyLink, another internet service provider, crashed down for most of the day, generating connectivity problems across Hulu, Xbox Live, and Discord.
While Fastly’s technical failure was resolved rather quickly, this incident may have served as a reminder of the fragility of internet infrastructures.
When internet traffic relies on a few servers to support its operation, a service provider like Fastly going down results in significant impacts across the internet.
