WEBSITES WORLDWIDE GO OFFLINE DUE TO CLOUD OUTAGE

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, Kelvin Chan reported for the Associated Press (AP).

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: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied.” 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 US dipped sharply minutes after the outage, which came a month after a cyberattack forced the shutdown of the biggest fuel pipeline in the US.

Fastly is a content delivery network, or CDN. It provides vital but behind-the-scenes cloud computing “edge servers” to many of the web’s popular sites. These servers store, or “cache,” 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.

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