Some of the World’s Biggest Websites Went Offline During a Massive Outage

A number of major websites were unavailable or not functioning properly on Tuesday morning, in an issue linked to cloud computing services provider Fastly.

VICE, Amazon, CNN, Twitch, BBC News, Reddit, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the UK government’s own website, were all down or experiencing serious issues for around an hour.

Anyone trying to access these websites, and many others, was greeted with an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message, or simply “connection failure.”

Some sites such as the BBC were able to restore some services by switching to a different hosting network.⁣

⁣It’s not yet clear what triggered the widespread outage. However, shortly before 10AM London time, Fastly said it was “currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN [content delivery network] services.”

At 10.45AM Fastly said the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented, as some websites came back online.

“The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” Fastly said in its most recent update.