A number of retail, news and social media websites experienced internet downtime caused by an outage at the global website cloud hosting service, Fastly.
For an hour from 11am BST today, users of Fastly’s hosting service including gov.uk, PayPal, Amazon and a whole host of other major company websites were greeted with and “Error 503 Service Unavailable” detailing problems with the cache server.
By 12.09pm BST, Fastly released a statement saying that their global network was coming back online and that it had been “investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN [content delivery network] services”. However, users were still met with slow loading times and sporadic access to multiple companies’ websites.
Error 503 message that greeted those trying to access the affected websites
When functioning correctly, CDNs such as Fastly aim to improve website security from denial-of-service attacks and reduce loading time for images, videos and HTML pages whilst managing sudden web traffic clusters for their customers’ websites.
ESET commented on the outage and its implication going forward with “whether it be malicious or otherwise, this highlights the importance and significance of these vast hosting companies and what they represent” – adding weight to the growing responsibility that these CDN providers have over global Internet control and access.
The outage raises security concerns over the over-centralisation of the internet in the hands of a few major hosting providers and asks questions about its reliability in the future should a larger scale problem like this occur again – demonstrating that we have not learned our lesson from the past hosting service outages as exemplified by the Cloudfare crash of 2019.
Full list of all websites affected below:
AFR, Age, Amazon, Boots, BuzzFeed, CNN, Deliveroo, Etsy, Evening Standard, Financial Times, Giphy, Horse and Hound, IGN, Imgur, Independent, Kickstarter, Le Monde, New York Times, PayPal, Pinterest, Reddit, Royal Mail, SMH, Spotify, Taboola, The Guardian, The Verge, Twitch, Twitter, UK Government website (including HM Revenue and Customs), Vimeo and Weightwatchers