Major global news, social media sites face outages caused by faulty service provider

[UPDATE: Massive internet outage linked to "service configuration" from US-based cloud company]

A huge chunk of the web—from government, news, and social media websites—faced a massive outage for an hour with US-based cloud company Fastly linked behind the blackout.

Major media sites, including the New York Times, CNN, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Financial Times, and Bloomberg were found to be experiencing problems. Other high-traffic sites like Reddit, Amazon, Twitch, PayPal, and Spotify were down, too, as recorded by tracking website Downdetector.com.

While the sites were down, users were greeted by a message reading “Error 503 Service Unavailable.” Now, these outlets are back up and running.

News publishers online came up with creative workarounds to keep their readers updated. Tech news site The Verge wrote about the temporary failure via Google Docs, while The Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the issues. The UK’s website provided an email for inquiries while the gov.uk website was down.

“The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return," shared Fastly.

Fastly is a cloud computing service designed to bring websites closer to the people who use them. It allows for faster website load times, optimized images, and other high-payload content to show up more quickly.

The company said that the outage was due to a “service configuration.” but it has yet to fully investigate. One thing’s for certain: it wasn’t a cybersecurity attack like most Twitter users are speculating.