A major internet outage has taken some of the world’s biggest web sites down, including livestreaming platform Twitch and social media website Reddit, courtesy of a global outage.
The outage appears to have hit Fastly, the latter being a content delivery network underpinning many of the world’s biggest websites (especially those hosted in the United States). Trying to connect to either Reddit or Twitch returned 503 errors, and users have noted that many other popular sites, like the user marketplace Etsy, developer forum Stack Overflow, Github and online auction house eBay, were affected.
Oh hey internet, are you okay? #twitter #reddit #twitch #aws pic.twitter.com/YaE5af6C3E
— Rene Pot (@wraldpyk) June 8, 2021
???? We are aware that users may be experiencing errors accessing Twitch at this time. Our team is currently investigating to fix this issue.
— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) June 8, 2021
Given the size and scale of content providers of this magnitude, any outage tends have an enormous impact on a large chunk on the internet. The BBC and American cable news service CNN both reported errors at the time of writing, although many Australian websites were unaffected.
there’s a huge web outage going on right now. Twitch, Reddit, Amazon, and even The Verge is down. Looks like a key CDN might be down
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) June 8, 2021
After the publication of this story, more Australian sites started to suffer outages. Major Australian mastheads like The Age and Sydney Morning Herald were struggling to load, while other websites were having issues with other elements.
Some organisations have gotten creative, in the meantime. US tech site The Verge was completely taken offline, so they resorted to posting into a Google Docs page instead:
how fucked is the internet right now? The Verge is now a Google Doc https://t.co/uuixOWcT59
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) June 8, 2021
Any outage affecting global cloud providers often has a cataclysmic effect throughout the internet, thanks to how prevalent they are to worldwide IT infrastructure. The proliferation of Internet of Things devices means that some ordinary household items can even be affected. The last major Amazon Web Services outage, for instance, resulted in users discovering that their doorbells and Roombas stopped functioning, because they could no longer access the internet.
By 8.45pm AEST, some major websites like Twitch and Reddit started to come back online. Fastly’s status page noted that “a fix has been applied”, although there may be some delays as services return to normal.
This post is being updated as more information comes to hand.