Large parts of the internet were taken offline – here’s why it was down

security
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

UPDATE: As of 10:57 UTC, Fastly says the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. It added that customers may expereicne increased load wait times on afffected sites.

Hundreds of the world's most popular websites were taken offline following following a serious outage at one of the most important internet service supporting companies.

Issues at Fastly knocked sites including Reddit, eBay, Amazon, Twitch and Gov.uk offline for users across the world.

Fastly is one of the world's leading content delivery network (CDN) providers - essentially forming the backbone of the internet for many of the world's top sites - including TechRadar.

CDN outage

The first reports of the outage came just after 5:30am EDT, according to Down Detector. 

Among the sites that saw issues or outages were:

  • TechRadar
  • Amazon
  • eBay
  • Reddit
  • BBC
  • Etsy
  • PayPal
  • Vimeo
  • Square
  • Squarespace
  • Giphy
  • Target
  • Spotify

Fastly first raised the alarm at 09:58 UTC, noting, "We're currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services."

The company has posted several updates on its status page since, and now believes it has identified the issue.

The outage appears to be affecting websites across the globe, with issues reported in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

Matt Swider