• Amazon Web Services, Spotify, CNN, PayPal, Reddit and others all went down on Tuesday morning suddenly   
  • It was caused by an outage at Fastly, the Content Distribution Network (CDN) used by millions of businesses
  • A CDN is a network of global servers that work together to provide faster internet loading speeds 
  • The majority of the world’s websites use them because they allow a quick transfer of HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos 
  • Fastly said the outage was caused by a service configuration that triggered the ‘disruptions’ – they’ve now disabled the configuration, they say 
  • The company won’t say what the service configuration was, or if they initiated it 

Hundreds of websites around the world went down this morning including CNN, The New York Times, Amazon Web Services, Shopify, PayPal, Reddit and the British Government after a ‘service configuration’ at their server provider Fastly triggered mass outages.

It’s unclear what the configuration was or whether or not Fastly intended for it to happen. Many sites are now back online but some, like CNN, remain blank.

Fastly said in a tweet: ‘We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online. ‘

The company won’t say what the configuration is, or if they deliberately initiated it.

Fastly is a CDN (Content Distribution Network) which services businesses by letting them use its global network of servers for their own websites.

The CDN increases internet loading speeds and it also offers cheaper bandwidth but it’s all run on one network.

If that network is compromised, like it was this morning, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all.

Cyber security experts are already saying that a hack can’t be ruled out.