Many Major Websites Down — Including Amazon, CNN and NY Times — Due to CDN Outage (UPDATE)

Colby HallJun 8th, 2021, 6:36 am
 

Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty

No, it is not just you. A number of major news and commerce websites are currently inaccessible, showing only users an error page that reads “Error 503 Service Unavailable,” due to an outage at massive CDN provider Fastly. This outage is currently affecting highly trafficked websites such as CNN, Reddit, Amazon, and the New York Times among many others.

Update: Fastly has just announced via their status page that “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”

A number of news outlets that had been negatively affected by the outage include  CNN, Reddit, the Guardian, the New York Times, BBC, Financial Times. Entertainment and service sites are also down like Spotify, Twitch, GitHub, HBOMax, Hulu, and PayPal.

Matt Taylor, Product Manager at FT, was among the first to spot the issue and believed the outage is due to these sites CDN provider Fastly, which the company appears to confirm. “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” the CDN said via their status page.

A CDN is a content delivery network that refers to a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.

Fastly is aware of the outage and has updated their status page multiple times but with no different message other than they are currently investigating the issue:

A number of recent RansomWare attacks on private businesses have led to increased concerns over cybersecurity, though at this point, it is not believed to be the source of the issue in this instance, though that could certainly change.

UPDATE: Fastly has just updated their status to read “Identified – The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” No other details have yet emerged. CNN’s website appears to be up and fully functional, while other news sites like the NY Times are accessible but very slowly populating.

This story is developing and will be updated as more news becomes available.

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Colby Hall - Founding Editor

Colby Hall is the Founding Editor of Mediaite.com. He is also a Peabody Award-winning television producer of non-fiction narrative programming as well as a terrific dancer and preparer of grilled meats.