Amazon, Reddit, Twitter and Twitch impacted by huge network outage

A huge internet outage has affected large swaths of the internet, including major sites like Amazon, Reddit, Twitter and Twitch, along with news sites including the New York Times and The Guardian. The source of the problem is the Fastly content delivery network (CDN), which has confirmed a global disruption. On its status page, Fastly said “we’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.” 

Other affected sites include Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo and Shopify, as our sister site TechCrunch has noted. While some are completely down with 503 errors, only images are affected on certain sites like Twitter and Amazon. 

Fastly describes itself as an “edge” network, sitting between users and websites. It includes their content delivery network, image optimization, video and streaming, cloud security, and load balancing services. Much like with Cloudflare, which went down last year, a failure on Fastly can affect enormous areas of the internet. 

Update 6/8/2021 6:49 AM ET: Fastly now states that “the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” Hopefully, that means the internet will return to normal shortly. 

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