Major internet outage downs top sites globally

An Internet outage world-wide affected some of the biggest services including Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest, CNN and Reddit on Tuesday afternoon.

Globally, the incident affected cities across the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and South Africa. In India, it services were down in Chennai, Mumbai, and New Delhi.

The outage was traced to a technical error in a content delivery network (CDN) run by Fastly. CDNs are an important part of the internet infrastructure as they act as proxy servers where companies cache certain data closer to the end-user to offer better services.

Fastly is one of the biggest CDN service providers and the outage affected websites including gov.uk, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, and The New York Times. Services such as Stack Overflow, GitHub, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, and Shopify were also impacted. Fastly on its status page confirmed it faced an outage at around 3:28 pm IST. The outage lasted nearly an hour as a fix was applied at around 4:30 pm IST.

“We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online,” the company said in a tweet.

Rajesh Chharia, President, Internet Service Providers Association of India, said, “This will have a major impact on the Internet traffic since these websites predominantly drive internet traffic. As of now, however, I will not be able to quantify this impact and establish its ramifications as this situation is developing real-time.”

Amitabh Singhal, Founder of internet and telecom advisory firm Telxess Consulting, said, “What India can do to prevent such an outage is encourage these companies to set up more robust infrastructure locally as well to pick up the slack in case there is a global outage.”

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