Someone literally broke the internet

So, the internet is kinda broken.

Many of the world’s biggest websites including Reddit, Amazon, Twitch, CNN, The New York Times, BBC, PayPal, HBO Max, Hulu, PayPal, even the UK government’s website appeared to be experiencing outages on Tuesday morning at around 10:50 a.m. BST / 5:50 a.m. ET.

Users started reporting website issues across numerous platforms on Downdetector simultaneously.

The problem is reportedly arising from performance issues with Fastly, an American cloud computing services provider. In a service status update at 10:58 a.m. BST, the company said, “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.” At 11:57 a.m. BST, Fastly reported, “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”

A Fastly spokesperson responded to Mashable’s request for comment: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration.” 

They added that Fastly’s global network is “coming back online” and that status updates could be viewed on its website. 

Major websites failed to load on Tuesday morning, instead appearing emblazoned with error messages, for example, the homepage of The Independent newspaper:

News outlets including the Guardian, The Verge, and others tweeted that their websites were being affected by a “wider internet outage.”

For many, Twitter appeared to still be operational, which was fortunate for those wanting to scream in the void while unable to access their favourite ways to waste time online. 

Get well soon, internet. 

This story is developing…

Disclaimer: Downdetector is owned by Mashable’s parent company, J2 Global.

UPDATE: June 8, 2021, 12:09 p.m. BST Added update from Fastly regarding identification of the issue and fix.