Internet Outage Hits Major Websites

A number of major websites could not be reached early Tuesday because of an outage at the cloud services company Fastly.The affected sites included news agencies CNN, The Guardian and The New York Times, streaming platform Twitch, and the British government website.  All were back online within a period of hours.The outage also forced CNN’s website offline in the Asian cities of Hong Kong and Singapore. There was little mention of the outage on social media platforms in China, where most foreign media websites are permanently blocked.About an hour after acknowledging the problem, Fastly said, “The issue has been identified, and a fix has been applied.”The company said a service configuration issue caused the disruptions, suggesting it was an internal glitch.Based in San Francisco, California, Fastly is a content-delivery network that provides cloud computing servers to many popular internet sites.The servers store images, video and other content in various places around the world to be closer to users. Closer proximity to the servers enables users to access content more quickly.The outage occurred about a month after a cyberattack caused the largest fuel pipeline operator in the United States to stop operating for six days.
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