Global Internet Outage Crashes Amazon, BBC, Reddit, And Other Big Websites; What Went Wrong?

If Instagram and YouTube outage in the last few months weren't enough, the mass internet outage reported today definitely gets all the headlines. The internet has been flooded with masses looking for answers as to why some of the major websites went temporarily available. Reports suggest that the global internet outage hampered the services of some big names such as Amazon, Reddit, BBC, CNN, and others. So, what caused this massive scale internet outage?

What Caused World's Biggest Websites To Crash?

The mass outage reported across the globe affected some major websites such as Amazon, BBC, CNN, Reddit, Spotify, and others on Tuesday. Users who were trying to access these websites were consistently getting an "Error 503 Service Unavailable" or "connection timeout" message.

Initially, the cause for this global internet issue wasn't traceable. However, later, a report via Reuters suggested a technical glitch at Fastly, a US-based cloud computing firm the reason for this mass internet outage. This technical glitch had an impact on not just major social media platforms, but also news, government, and even micro websites.

The Guardian's website is down entirely, so this thread is now our formal liveblog for the Fastly outage.

— alex hern (@alexhern) June 8, 2021

Fastly has also acknowledged the issue. The cloud company first notified the masses via its status page that an investigation is being conducted to know why this issue impacted performance with its CDN services.

Just for reference, Alex Hern, The Guardian's technology corresponded had notified that the massive outage is due to the failure in a content delivery network (CDN) managed by Fastly. Following this Fastly acknowledged the issue assuring investigations on the matter underway for a fix.

Which All Websites Were Affected? Is The Issue Resolved?

As mentioned earlier, the mass internet outage had impacted several noted foreign websites such as Amazon, BBC, CNN, Endgadget, Pinterest, The Guardian, Twitch, and Reddit. The global internet outage also caused some other major websites to crash such as Financial Times and the New York Times.

Some popular entertainment websites such as HBO Max, Hulu, Vimeo and others were also impacted. The list also includes the UK government's (gove.uk) website, Quora, PayPal, Shopify. GitGub, and Stack Overflow.

We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online. Continued status is available at https://t.co/RIQWX0LWwl

— Fastly (@fastly) June 8, 2021

In its latest Tweet, Fastly has confirmed the issue has been identified and a fix has been implemented. The company has reassured that their global network is coming online so all the affected services should be back to normal.