Websites back online after 'Fastly' glitch

Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were coming back online after getting hit by a widespread hour-long outage on Tuesday.

The issue was linked to US-based cloud company Fastly Inc.

High-traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify and the New York Times went down, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

They came back up after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.

"Our global network is coming back online," Fastly said.

One of the world's most widely-used cloud-based content delivery network providers, the company earlier reported a disruption from a "service configuration" and did not explain.

"Incidents like this underline the fragility of the internet and its dependence on a patchwork of fragmented technology. Ironically, this also underlines its inherent strength and how quickly it can recover," Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight said.

"The fact that an outage like this can grab headlines around the world shows how rare it is."

Fastly, which went public in 2019 and has a market capitalization of under $6 billion, is far smaller than peers like Amazon's AWS.

The company's content delivery network (CDN) helps websites move content using less-congested routes, enabling them to reach consumers faster.

Apart from Fastly, the other main CDN providers include Akamai Technologies, Cloudera and AWS.

The United Kingdom's attorney general earlier tweeted that the country's main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.

The disruption may have caused issues for citizens booking COVID-19 vaccinations or reporting test results, the Financial Times reported.

Websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, the Guardian and Bloomberg News also faced outages.

News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the outage when their websites failed to load up.

Popular tech website the Verge used Google Docs to report news, while UK Technology Editor at the Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the problems.

At the onset of the outage, nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to Downdetector.com.

Twitter users quickly reacted to the outage, creating the #InternetShutdown hashtag with KITKAT's official handle telling its 441,500 followers "Guess it's time to Have A Break."

Shares of New York-listed Fastly were up 4.7% at $52.80, after being down nearly 4% in pre-market trading.