• by Ray Schultz , June 8, 2021

Publishing websites worldwide went down on Tuesday morning following an outage at cloud provider Fastly. But Fastly claims service is getting back on track. 

Among the sites affected were USA Today, CNN, The New York Times,The Financial Times and Google, in addition to Shopify,  YouTube, Zoom, Instagram, Hulu, Amazon, and Spotify, according to reports.   

Visitors to those sites and others received varying messages stating the sites were unavailable. The majority of reports about the sites came in around 8 a.m. EDT, judging by downdetector. 

Fastly tweeted at around 7:30 a.m. EDT: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online.” 

However, in a status update, Fastly added that clusters “may continue to experience decreased cache hit ratio and increased origin load as global services return.” 

Earlier, Fastly had reported: “We're currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.”  

Still unclear at deadline were the total impact and origin of the outages.  

Downdetector reports that complaints spiked about The New York Times and CNN sites around 8 a.m. EDT, with most issues concerning website access. Also hit were the UK’s gov.uk site.  

The outages spread from North America to South Africa, reports state.  

Fastly says on its website: “Our powerful edge cloud platform empowers developers to run, secure, and deliver websites and applications — as close to the users as possible, to create unforgettable experiences at global scale.