Breaking! A whole lot of websites are down including Reddit, NYT, Guardian, Twitch, etc

Update: The Verge is back up, as is CNN and The Guardian. The other sites that were inaccessible are slowly coming back up soon so it seems like Fastly has managed to fix the issue. 

We think the internet broke. No really. It did. A whole bunch of websites were down and inaccessible for more than an hour including Reddit, Twitch, Paypal, Amazon UK, The Verge, etc. According to Down Detector, Twitter, CNN, NYT, Hulu, and Target websites were also down. 

Reports have it that a product manager at the Financial Times has notes that Fastly, a CDN provider that underpins a lot of major websites, is dealing with a massive outage that could be the reason for all these sites being inaccessible. While Twitter is not exactly down, you can see certain tweets and user handles/names with a question mark icon instead of emojis. 

BBC reported that news sites like Guardian, Financial Times, Independent, and the NYT are currently not working. The UK government website, gov.uk, has also been affected. All these affected websites are displaying the “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message. The report also mentioned that this could be related to the Fastly outage. 

The Verge was reporting out of Google Docs currently since their website was down (can't make this stuff up, I swear!), and wrote that “a huge outage hs swept across the internet, taking many popular sites offline including Amazon, Twitch, and Reddit”. The outage began at around 5:30 AM ET (around 3 PM IST) taking a number of news sites offline. As explained, huge outages like these are “generally traced back to some central service provider”, in this case, which happens to be Fastly.  Fastly said it had begun investigating “potential impact to performance with our CDN services” at 05:58 AM ET. 

On the other hand, Guardian took a smarter Twitter route to report their story. You can follow the thread here:

BBC managed to restore services by switching their systems away from the Fastly network, other sites might also follow suit. 

The issue has reportedly been identified by Fastly and a fix is being implemented, as MacRumours tweeted. The CDN provider has not explained what lead to this outage yet, but we are expecting an explanation soon.