The Wall Street Journal reports affected sites include the U.K. government’s main public-services portal and several major U.S. and European news outlets, such as the New York Times and Le Monde. They were inaccessible to at least some users for about an hour, beginning around 6 a.m. Eastern Time.
Fastly Inc., the operator of a content-delivery network service that many websites use to help speed the loading of their webpages for users, appears to have been at the root of the problems. Shortly before 7 a.m., the company said it had applied a fix to a service configuration problem, and websites began to come back online.
Joshua Bixby, Fastly’s chief executive, reached in the middle of the outage, said the company was investigating the issue, but that it wasn’t attack-related.
Fastly operates what it calls an edge cloud network, which means it stores content from its clients’ websites on a large number of servers that are closer to where potential users are located. Such content-delivery networks trim the amount of time it takes information to reach end-users, speeding up things like website loading and the playing of streaming video.
The setup, though, can make swaths of the internet vulnerable to failures that affect a single delivery network. On its website, Fastly lists dozens of clients. Tuesday’s interruption caused Fastly’s observed traffic volume to drop by about 75%, according to network monitoring company Kentik Inc.
Past web outages have traced back to breaks in other parts of the digital supply chain. A crude 2016 cyberattack against Dyn, a service that acts as a virtual directory for internet addresses, took down hundreds of websites.
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