Fastly outage: News, government sites around world crash after glitch

Websites for the White House, the British government and media left inaccessible in mass internet outage.

A mass internet outage sent websites around the world down on Tuesday night, including sites for the White House, the British government and international media.

Many websites both within Australia and internationally were affected, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review and the Brisbane Times.

Internationally the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Financial Times were all impacted and unable to show any content.

The sites were all offline at around 8pm, but shortly before 9pm many appeared to be resuming services as normal.

Australian news websites including The Guardian, The Age, The AFR all inaccessible https://t.co/qOepk3LMNA

— David Swan (@swan_legend) June 8, 2021

In Europe, France’s Le Monde was also displaying an error message, as was Japan’s Nikkei and major social media site Reddit, gaming-service Twitch and image-sharing site Pinterest.

A message reading, “Error 503 Service Unavailable” was displaying across many of the affected websites for about one hour.

The Age said its technology teams were working hard to get their site back up and running.

Sky News was affected, with no videos playing on its website. 7Plus was also down for a shot while. Nine’s streaming service 9Now’s streaming service was also hit by the outage but was eventually restored.

A major outage is affecting news sites across the world, including The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and the AFR. Our IT team is working hard to get us back online

— The Age (@theage) June 8, 2021

The cause was an apparent glitch with popular intenet content delivery network (CDN) provider Fastly, whose technology powers many websites globally.

The tech company confirmed the mass outage on its status page.

About 9pm AEST Fastly posted a message saying a fix had been applied and that services were returning to normal.

“The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” the company said in the message.

A major outage is affecting news sites across the world, including The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and the AFR. Our IT team is working hard to get us back online.

— Financial Review (@FinancialReview) June 8, 2021

Fastly is one of the major CDN providers globally, alongside Amazon, Google, Akamai and Cloudflare.

CDNs are geographically distanced networks of servers that help minimise delays in loading web page content, by reducing the physical distance between the servers and users.

Their services sit in the chain between the content publisher and the end user.

Nine issued an email to staff on Tuesday night explaining the severe outage affecting many of their news sites.

“An incident with our CDN vendor, Fastly, is impacting multiple Nine services including Metro and AFR Mastheads, Nine Network sites, and Editorial tools,” Nine said.

“Internal tech teams are exploring mitigation options and are in contact with the vendor. This appears to be a far-reaching incident affecting multiple Fastly customers. More updates to follow when they are available.”

9Now streaming is being restored with services back online following a global outage affecting major websites.

Thanks for your patience and we hope you enjoy catching up on streaming any of your fave programs you may have missed tonight! https://t.co/tgi6F5ACou

— Channel9 (@Channel9) June 8, 2021

A notice posted by Fastly on its website revealed the outage had affected services around the globe.

Details from web services provider Fastly about a major outage that affected news services worldwide. Picture: Supplied