What do some of the biggest websites in the world have in common? Were down this week 🚨

A glitch at Fastly, a popular CDN provider, was the reason for a global outage that lasted around two hours

On June 8, 2021, countless popular websites including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC, and Financial Times faced this week an outage that lasted around two hours.

Fastly has confirmed it’s facing an outage on its status website.

Problems started to be reported around 09:00 AM GMT+1 and only around 11:00 AM GMT+1 some websites started coming back up. “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” San Francisco-headquartered Fastly said on its status page.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a key part of the internet infrastructure. These companies run global networks of servers to improve the performance and availability of web services. CDNs act as proxy servers and cache some data as close to the end-user as possible. For instance, media content is often cached at a CDN server near you so that it doesn’t have to be fetched on the original server every time a user loads a web page.