Sites affected by the Fastly outage
The reason behind the internet outage is due to Fastly, a cloud computing services provider that many of the sites use. Fastly runs an “edge cloud” which speeds up loading times and helps keep traffic under control, as well as protecting from denial-of-service attacks.
Because of how Fastly works by sitting between the site and users, the service going offline could potentially take the site down altogether and prevent access, which is what has happened today. When the outages were reported, Fastly said, “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services”.
Some of the sites have managed to come back by moving their services away from Fastly whilst it is down. This hasn’t fixed every site though, as some are coming in and out of service, like Twitch.
At the time of writing, more and more services are coming back, although Fastly’s status page still has a warning sign on it and the note that the team is still investigating the matter.
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