LONDON (AP) 鈥� Dozens of websites briefly went offline around the globe Tuesday, including CNN, The New York Times and Britain's government home page, after an outage at the cloud service Fastly, illustrating how vital a small number of behind-the-scenes companies have become to running the internet.
The sites that could not be reached also included some Amazon pages, the Financial Times, Reddit, Twitch and The Guardian.
San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 6 a.m. Eastern. About an hour later, the company said: 鈥淭he issue has been identified and a fix has been applied.鈥�
Most of the sites soon appeared to be back online.
Fastly said it had identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions, meaning the outage appeared to be caused internally. Brief internet service outages are not uncommon and are only rarely the result of hacking or other mischief.
Still, major futures markets in the U.S. dipped sharply minutes after the outage, which came a month after a cyberattack forced the in the U.S.
Fastly is a content-delivery network, or CDN. It provides vital but behind-the-scenes cloud computing 鈥渆dge servers鈥� to many of the web鈥檚 popular sites. These servers store, or 鈥渃ache,鈥� content such as images and video in places around the world so that it is closer to users, allowing them to fetch it more quickly and smoothly.
its services mean that a European user going to an American website can get the content 200 to 500 milliseconds faster.
Internet traffic measurement by Kentik showed that Fastly began to recover from the outage roughly an hour after it struck at mid-morning European time, before most Americans were awake.
鈥淟ooks like it is slowly coming back,鈥� said Doug Madory, an internet infrastructure expert at Kentik. He said 鈥渋t is serious because Fastly is one of the world鈥檚 biggest CDNs and this was a global outage.鈥�
The impact of Fastly鈥檚 trouble highlights the relative fragility of the internet鈥檚 architecture given its heavy reliance on Big Tech companies 鈥� such as Amazon鈥檚 AWS cloud services 鈥� as opposed to a more decentralized array of companies.
鈥淓ven the biggest and most sophisticated companies experience outages. But they can also recover fairly quickly,鈥� Madory said.
When the outage hit, some visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: 鈥淔astly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.鈥� Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message, while visits to The New York Times and U.K. government's gov.uk site returned an "Error 503 Service Unavailable" message, along with the line 鈥淰arnish cache server," which is a technology that Fastly is built on.
Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, posted reports on dozens of sites going down.
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Frank Bajak in Boston and Zen Soo in Hong Kong contributed to this report.
Kelvin Chan , The Associated Press
