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Alex Peebles

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Social media, news websites hit by major internet outage

Jun 08, 2021

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(Reuters) – Multiple outages hit social media, government and news websites across the globe on Tuesday morning, with some reports pointing to a glitch at U.S.-based cloud computing services provider Fastly.

Reuters could not immediately confirm the issue affecting the sites.

Fastly said it was investigating “the potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” according to its website.

Most of Fastly’s coverage areas were facing “Degraded Performance”, the website showed.

Separately, Amazon.com Inc’s retail website also seemed to be down. Amazon was not immediately available to comment.

Nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector.com.

Amazon’s Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector’s website.

Websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times and Bloomberg News also faced outages.

Gwen Baumgardner: A MASSIVE OUTAGE ROCKS A LARGE CHUNK OF THE INTERNET.
I’M GWEN WITH STRAIGHT ARROW NEWS.
THE OUTAGE IS LINKED TO A U-S CLOUD COMPANY CALLED FASTLY.
IT AFFECTED SOME pretty BIG SITES — AMAZON — CNN — PAYPAL — SPOTIFY — AND THE NEW YORK TIMES.
EVEN THE UNITED KINGDOM’S MAIN GOV-DOT-U-K WEBSITE WENT DOWN!
OUTAGES TIMES RANGED FROM A FEW MINUTES TO MORE THAN AN HOUR.
FASTLY SAYS THE ISSUE HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED — AND FIXED.