#InternetShutdown: Social Media, Government Portals And News Websites Hit By Major Internet Outage

New Delhi: On Tuesday, multiple outages impacted websites around the world, disrupting news sites and social media platforms. According to reports, Amazon.com Inc’s retail website appeared to be down as well. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit, Twitch, Spotify, and Pinterest were all affected as well.

Leading news agencies’ websites, including the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, and CNN, were unavailable. Quora was also unavailable for users in India, but it looks to be operational again presently. According to Engadget, other sites affected included Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, and Shopify.

The “massive internet outage” has been traced to a malfunction in a content delivery network (CDN) owned by Fastly, according to the Guardian’s UK technology journalist Alex Hern in a detailed thread on Twitter.

His post also mentions that the outage, which began soon before 11 a.m. UK time, caused visitors to a wide range of websites to see error messages such as “Error 503 Service Unavailable” and a curt “connection failure.” When we tried to access CNN, we received the same 503 error.

The problem, according to Hern’s thread, may be traced back to Fastly, a cloud computing services provider that operates a “edge cloud that is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service assaults, and help them deal with bursts of traffic.”