A number of
major global websites, including media, government and social sites, were
inaccessible temporarily on Tuesday due to glitches in the content delivery
network of US cloud computing service provider Fastly.

The San Francisco-based
firm said that the “issue has been identified and a fix has been applied.
Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return”, AFP reported.

It also
said that all stations, including three in India – in Chennai, New Delhi and
Mumbai – were suffering from “degraded performance”.

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

AFP quoted
experts saying the incident being an external attack was not likely.

Among the affected
websites were media websites CNN, the Financial Times, The Guardian, France’s
Le Monde newspaper, Italy’s Corriere delle Serra and Spanish daily El Mundo and
social and entertainment platforms such as Reddit, Quora, Twitch among others. The
White House and the British government website, gov.uk, were also unavailable
for a while.  

Affected
websites displayed error messages like “Error 503 Service Unavailable” and “connection
failure”.

What is content delivery network?

The glitches
pertained to Fastly’s content delivery network. The firm helps websites with reduce
loading speed and with the presentation of their content. This is done by hosting proxy
websites around the world in order to prevent all requests to access websites from
causing a traffic jam.

The service
is critical for high-traffic websites which have audio and visual content, like
media and news websites. Companies like Fastly and rivals such as Cloudfare handle
billions of such requests daily and play a lesser-known but vital part in
global internet access.

Fastly’s
clients include Deliveroo, Pinterest and Shazam. The company recorded a
turnover of $291 million last year.