In a separate incident, Amazon.com Inc’s retail website appeared to be down. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment right away.
On Tuesday morning, several outages struck social networking, government, and news websites throughout the world, with some reports pointing to a problem at Fastly, a US-based cloud computing services provider. These websites’ home pages displayed an ‘Error 503′ notice.
The issue impacting the sites was not immediately confirmed by Reuters.
Fastly said “The problem has been recognized, and a solution has been implemented. As global services resume, customers may see an increase in origin load.” Previously, the majority of Fastly’s coverage zones had “Degraded Performance,” according to the company’s website.
According to its website, Fastly is looking into “the possible damage on performance using our CDN services.” Companies that maintain worldwide networks of servers employ content delivery networks or CDNs. They aid speed by caching data as near as possible to the end-user, allowing web pages to load faster because the data does not need to be downloaded from the originating server.
Fastly bills itself as a “cloud edge platform.” Many of the internet’s most well-known websites benefit from its behind-the-scenes cloud computing services, which include assisting them in storing, or “caching,” material on servers across the world so that it is closer to consumers.
As per the website, the majority of Fastly’s coverage zones were experiencing “Degraded Performance.” “Reports indicate there may be a broad outage at Fastly, which may be disrupting your service,” according to Down Detector, which detects internet outages.
By 11:00 GMT, several of the websites were slowly returning to service.
The UK administration’s website, Reddit, video live streaming service Twitch, and significant media companies’ websites, including The New York Times, BBC News, The Financial Times, and The Guardian, were all unavailable.
Other websites affected by the outage included Quora, Shopify, and Vimeo.
According to press sources, the global outage was caused by a problem with content delivery network supplier Fastly. Some of Fastly’s clients were also affected, including Business Insider and Imgur.
Sticking to failure tracking website Downdetector.com, around 21,000 Reddit users reported troubles with the social media network, while more than 2,000 users reported troubles with Amazon.
Keeping in consideration the Downdetector’s website, Amazon’s Twitch was also undergoing unavailability.
“We’re still looking into this,” Fastly, located in San Francisco, wrote on its status page, referring to the situation as a “Global CDN Disruption.” There was no proof, however, that this was the reason for the outage.
According to Google Trends, online searches for “503 error” began to spike about 3.14 p.m. Indian Standard Time. Nevertheless, Twitter users took advantage of the downtime to share jokes and memes on the social media platform.
What does ‘ERROR 503’ mean?
The message ‘503 Service Unavailable’ is an error response code that indicates the server is not ready to accept the request. A server that is offline for maintenance or that is congested is likely the reason.
