The Guardian, Financial Times, Independent and New York Times websites all went down this morning, the result of a sudden global internet outage that affected dozens of major websites.
Press Gazette’s website – along with that of the UK Government, The Evening Standard and French newspaper Le Monde – was also impacted by the outage, which lasted for about an hour.
Visiting affected websites resulted in the messages: “Error 503 Service Unavailable” or “connection failure”.
US firm Fastly, a content delivery network which helps websites speed up loading times and present their content to users, has been reported as the cause of the outage. The company said it was looking into an issue which had a “potential impact to performance with our CDN services”.
Guardian website down: What they told readers
The Guardian tweeted: “The Guardian’s website and app are currently being affected by a wider internet outage and will be back as soon as possible.” It was forced to use Twitter, which was not impacted, to report on the outage.
https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/1402210287504273411?s=20
The Independent has just published an article about how major news websites are down, which you can't read because major news websites are down pic.twitter.com/h05EEQMXP6
— Josh Salisbury (@josh_salisbury) June 8, 2021
Other websites affected included the online discussion platform Reddit, the Evening Standard and French newspaper Le Monde. Those affected
Websites affected by the outage appeared to be gradually coming back online shortly before midday, but with slow loading times.
Fastly, which protects websites from denial-of-service cyberattacks and helps them deal with bursts of traffic in order to stay online and stable, has since updated its service status page, saying: “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”
Press Gazette and numerous other sites in New Statesman Media Group (such as the New Statesman, World of Fine Wine, Capital Monitor and Tech Monitor) were also impacted.
Amazon Web Services, Reddit, The UK government’s website, Spotify and Twitch were also among the websites impacted according to Business Week.
Additional reporting by PA Media.
Picture: Shutterstock
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