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Alert! The Internet is Down: Reddit, Amazon, UK Government Websites Crash
interestingengineering.com

Alert! The Internet is Down: Reddit, Amazon, UK Government Websites Crash

Some of the world's biggest and most well-known websites crashed for about an hour on Tuesday, June 8, including Amazon, PayPal, and the UK Government.

Science & Tech

A number of the world's most used and most famous websites have crashed including Amazon, Reddit, the BBC, the New York Times, PayPal, the U.K. Government's sites, and more, as was first reported by the Independent.

The U.K. Government's official website is displaying an "error" message when you try to open it, and Reddit is showing up with empty squares.

Within an hour of the websites crashing, most appeared to be back up and running as usual, reported the BBC, one of the sites that had crashed.

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Most websites showed a "Error 503 Service Unavailable" message at the time, and were localized in the U.S. and Europe.

The internet issues were connected to the cloud computing provider, Fastly, which provides key services to many websites worldwide.

Fastly published an update of the "Content Delivery Network (CDN) Global Disruption," pointing out that the issue was first caught and started being investigated at 9:58 AM UTC. The issue was identified and being fixed at 10:44 AM UTC, and the fix was applied by 10:57 AM UTC along with a comment from Fastly stating "Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return."

Fastly is typically used to speed up loading times for websites, assist them during heavy traffic, and protect them from "denial of service" attacks, explains the BBC.