A major internet outage on Tuesday hit websites across the world, affecting social media and leading news platforms.
According to multiple reports, Amazon, BBC and the UK government’s gov.uk sites were among those hit in the massive and simultaneous internet outage.
Reuters reported that while some websites went down completely, others experienced smaller disruption.
News websites including the Guardian, Financial Times, Independent, New York Times, Evening Standard and Reddit were also affected by the outage which seemed to have been triggered by an issue with Fastly, one of the world’s major content delivery networks (CDNs).
Other websites affected included eBay, Shopify, Etsy, Imgur, the Evening Standard and French newspaper Le Monde.
A CDN is a system used to host websites and their content on the internet and serve it to users.
Fastly reported a major outage across its global network, saying it is “currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services”.
The company offers services such as speeding up loading times for websites, protecting them from denial-of-service cyberattacks and helping them deal with bursts of traffic in order to stay online and stable.
