Cloud failures paralyze thousands of websites

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Thousands of websites went offline for nearly an hour on Tuesday morning, including several of the world’s largest news sites, streaming services, online retailers and even the British government, disrupting millions of Internet users.

The connection problem that lasted for nearly an hour appeared to affect news sites, including BBC, New York Times and FT.com, streaming services Spotify, Twitch, Hulu and HBO Max, payment service Stripe and message board Reddit. Together, online services reach hundreds of millions of people every day.

The outage on the UK website gov.uk may cause problems for people booking Covid-19 vaccination or reporting test results.

A Silicon Valley Internet infrastructure provider called Fastly is believed to be behind the interruption. Fastly did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Fastly operates a content delivery network designed to speed up the loading of web pages and larger files such as music and videos. Other large CDN providers include Cloudflare, Akamai, and Limelight.

CDN stores corporate customer data on servers around the world, and reduces the burden on the Internet “backbone” by bringing content closer to consumers’ smartphones and PCs.

Fast Online status page 09.58 UTC began to report problems with its CDN service.

About 45 minutes later, it said: “The problem has been determined and the repair is being implemented.”

In addition to several well-known media groups, Fastly’s website also lists e-commerce platforms Shopify and Stripe, as well as retailers among its customers, including Wayfair, Boots, Dunelm, Ticketmaster, and Deliveroo.

Stripe said in a tweet on its status page: “We are currently investigating an issue with the dashboard and support site failing to load. We will post an update as soon as possible.”

Fastly is listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of just under $6 billion, and its share price fell about 2% in pre-market trading on Tuesday. This ten-year-old company is headquartered in San Francisco.

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