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LONDON (AP) — Dozens of internet sites went down briefly round the globe Tuesday, including CNN, The ny Times and Britain’s government home page, after an outage at the cloud computing service Fastly, illustrating how vital alittle number of behind-the-scenes companies became to running the web
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The sites that would not be reached also included some Amazon pages, the Financial Times, Reddit, Twitch and therefore the Guardian.
San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a drag just before 6 a.m. Eastern. About an hour later, the corporate said: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied.” Most of the sites soon seemed to be back online.
The company said in an emailed statement that it had been a “technical issue” and “not associated with a cyber attack.”
Still, major futures markets within the U.S. dipped sharply minutes after the outage, which came a month after hackers forced the shutdown of the most important fuel pipeline within the U.S.
Fastly may be a content-delivery network, or CDN. It provides vital but behind-the-scenes cloud computing “edge servers” to several of the web’s popular sites. These servers store, or “cache,” content like images and video in places round the world in order that it’s closer to users, allowing them to fetch it more quickly and smoothly.
Fastly says its services mean that a eu user getting to an American website can get the content 200 to 500 milliseconds faster.
Internet traffic measurement by Kentik showed that Fastly began to get over the outage roughly an hour after it struck at mid-morning European time, before most Americans were awake.
“Looks love it is slowly returning ,” said Doug Madory, an online infrastructure expert at Kentik. He said “it is serious because Fastly is one among the world’s biggest CDNs and this was a worldwide outage.”
Brief internet service outages aren’t uncommon and are only rarely the results of hacking or other mischief.
Fastly stock jumped almost 11% on Tuesday as investors shrugged off the matter .
Still, the incident highlighted the relative fragility of the internet’s architecture given its heavy reliance on Big Tech companies — like Amazon’s AWS cloud services — as against a more decentralized array of companies.
“Even the most important and most sophisticated companies experience outages. But they will also recover fairly quickly,” Madory said.
When the outage hit, some visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.” Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up an identical message, while visits to The ny Times and U.K. government’s gov.uk site returned an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message, along side the road “Varnish cache server,” which may be a technology that Fastly is made on.
Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, posted reports on dozens of web sites taking place .
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