An internet outage Tuesday disrupted important websites including Amazon, Reddit and news outlets including The New York Times.
The outage began at 6 a.m. ET, with users reporting error messages such as "Error 503 Service Unavailable" and "connection failure."
Fastly, an American cloud computing services company was to blame, reports said. Its status page said it was looking into a technical problem. It now says that the problem has been rectified.
Fastly supports news sites and apps like CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times and others. It also delivers content to services such as Twitch, Pinterest, HBO Max, Hulu, Reddit, Spotify and others. Other big online platforms and sites, such as Amazon, Target and the U.K. government website - Gov.UK - were affected.
Fastly said it had found and resolved the problem. Fastly said service for sites and applications began to be restored at 7 a.m. ET but that some users may suffer lengthier load times as a result of the problem.
Several countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia as well as South Africa were affected.
Fastly knocked down its own network with a faulty software update - a rare but not unheard of mishap that has previously shut down parts of even larger online platforms such as Google and Amazon.
When Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, encountered a glitch in 2017, some of the world's most popular websites went offline for several hours over the entire U.S. East Coast.
Meanwhile, in 2019, Cloudflare, a web security company based in the U.S., encountered a hiccup that lasted about an hour and affected websites such as the chat service Discord and the dating site OkCupid.
