8 Jun 2021

Websites across globe crash following cloud provider glitch

11:06 pm on 8 June 2021

Multiple outages hit social media, government and news websites across the globe this evening, with reports pointing to a glitch at US-based cloud computing services provider Fastly.

The 503 error affected multiple popular homepages across the world.

The 503 error affected multiple popular homepages across the world. Photo: RNZ

Fastly released a statement this evening confirming a global CDN disruption issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented.

Radio New Zealand's homepage went down at approximately 9.45pm and was restored at 10.27pm.

Fastly had said it was investigating "the potential impact to performance with our CDN services," according to its website.

Most of Fastly's coverage areas were facing "Degraded Performance", the website showed.

Separately, Amazon.com Inc's retail website also seemed to be down. Amazon was not immediately available to comment.

Nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector.com.

Amazon's Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector's website.

Websites operated by other news outlets, including the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times and Bloomberg News also faced outages.

-Reuters/RNZ