Multiple websites, including that of major news organisations such as the BBC, the New York Times and CNN, have begun functioning again after they went offline due to a massive but temporary internet outage.
The technical glitch happened at the end of Fastly, a popular content delivery network (CDN) provider. The Cloud computing services provider said that the issue has been identified.
"The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return," Fastly said in an update.
Fastly moves content closer to end users, in theory helping sites manage traffic spikes and mitigate security threats. The company says putting data and applications at the edge of the network results in a better experience for users, enabling pages to load quicker and sites to manage high volumes of page requests better, for example in a breaking news situation.
"We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs [points of presence] globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online," a Fastly spokesperson was quoted as saying in media reports.
A CDN refers to a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of internet content.
Several popular websites were down, including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, GitHub, Hulu, HBO Max, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, BBC, Financial Times and many more.
"Error 503 Service Unavailable," was the message that appeared on the affected websites earlier.
Other popular websites affected were gov.uk, Quora, PayPal, Shopify and others.
The issues affected the UK government websites as British citizens were unable to renew passports, apply for tax allowances, or obtain driving licence during the outage.
The Guardian newspaper said its website and app were affected by a wider internet outage.
"Outages were reported in locations as varied as London, Texas and New Zealand," the report noted.
Last year, a problem with Cloudflare, another CDN company, led to a half-hour outage for most of the internet in major cities across Europe and the Americas.
