For about an hour, anyone trying to access the BBC or CNN website or browse Reddit received the same “Error 503 Service Unavailable” error code, with the same experience repeated on several sites.
The contention was the failure of Fastly, the company that provides the CDN, the content distribution network, which ensures the operation of many of these sites. On Twitter, Matt Taylor, product manager at the Financial Times – who was also offline – offered some pointers on the matter.
“Quickly, the CDN provider is experiencing a major glitch, causing 503 errors on Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit, The Guardian or FT” and the BBC, CNN and New York Times websites are not working, he wrote on the social network. The extent of this flaw also reaches into the government domain: websites linked to the UK government have the same error. In the area that Fastly makes available to users Monitor the status of services, the American company left a warning about this failure, which would have been detected around 11 am (mainland Portugal time). Since that time, the company says it is “considering the potential impact on the performance of CDN services.”
The company had been sharing updates over the past half hour, noting that it “continues to investigate this issue.” On the same page you can see that different regions, from North America to Europe, have affected the services.
The Verge in North America, which belongs to Vox Media, is another information channel affected by the failure. Specializing in the subject of technology, he uses Google Docs and social networks such as Twitter to share articles with readers about this flaw.
Large parts of the internet are offline, including The Verge. Until we get back, we’ll inform you directly outside of Google Docs. Here’s what we know so far about the power outages: https://t.co/4b1p2qhYif
edge (verge) June 8, 2021
It quickly states that it has already identified the situation that caused this failure, and is “implementing the repair”
Failure also affects certain services
Although some sites are still operating, as was the case with Twitter, they have not escaped part of the consequences of this failure. While some sites are completely down and cannot be accessed by users, others continue to work but with some services affected.
In the case of Twitter, for example, there are currently some issues with displaying certain images, such as emojis. According to the Guardian’s technology editor, Fastly is the company responsible for hosting these images on Twitter.
(Updated at 12:15 pm)
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