Internet Breakdown: Amazon, New York times hit by outage

Internet users were hit by a lack of online connectivity when “large swathes of the internet broke after an apparent problem with the infrastructure underpinning many of the world’s biggest websites”.

This was according to report in The Independent which highlighted the break down in the internet in a report on Tuesday.

According to The Independent sites ranging from Reddit and the New York Times to even the UK government’s website stopped loading. Users were not able to access the sites and a range of error messages popped up on their screens when they attempted to browse. The Independent reported that its website had also been impacted by the temporary break down of parts of the world wide web.

Facebook continued to operate during the internet outage and workplaces relying on office related services such as  Slack and Microsoft Teams seemed to be unaffected by the internet break down.

Users who attempted to browsed the range of affected websites saw a message that read “Fastly error: unknown domain”

“The issues appeared to be the result of a problem with Fastly, a cloud computing company that provides key services to many websites,” The Independent reported.

“Many of the world’s biggest news organisations, including the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Financial Times and The Independent were also affected by the problems,” The Independent reported.

Reddit, HBO Max, Twitch CNN, Amazon, Etsy, and Paypal, all reported outages of varying sizes according to the tracking website Down Detector.

The Independent noted that other sites were not fully down but still refused to work properly. Twitter, for instance, loaded – but any emoji that were used in posts did not,” The Independent reported.

Fastly noted on its website that the problem lay with its CDN, or content delivery network, which is a set of servers that delivers the content that makes up websites, ensuring that data is sent as quickly as possible