Patch, Other Websites Back Online After Global Fastly Disruption

ACROSS AMERICA — Multiple websites — including Patch, The New York Times, CNN and others around the globe — went offline briefly Tuesday morning after an outage linked to the cloud service content-delivery company Fastly.

The outage, which affected multiple government, news and social media companies, revealed how critical a handful of Big Tech companies have become in running the internet’s plumbing.

Doug Madory, an internet infrastructure expert at the internet traffic measurement company Kentik, told The Associated Press the disruption is a “serious” issue because the San Francisco-based Fastly is one of the world’s biggest content-delivery networks “and this was a global outage.”

Internet users in the United States and United Kingdom received the message “Error 503 Service Unavailable” when trying to connect to sites such as the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reddit, Amazon, Twitter, PayPal, Spotify, Twitch, BBC and The Guardian, among others.

The cities of Hong Kong and Singapore were affected. In China, where most foreign media websites are blocked, there was little discussion of the outage on social media platforms such as Weibo.

The outage lasted anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. Fastly said “the issue had been identified, and a fix has been applied,” Reuters reported. The company said the outage was triggered by an internal service configuration.

The first reports of Fastly outages came around 6 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Though services were restored in about an hour, some sites continued to experience slow loading times, CNBC reported.

Fastly uses behind-the-scenes cloud computing “edge servers” that store, or “cache,” content such as images and video in places around the world so they are closer to users, allowing them to fetch it more quickly and smoothly instead of having to access the site’s original server.

That means a European user going to a U.S. website can access the content from 200 to 500 milliseconds faster.

Madory, of Kentick, told The AP that “even the biggest and most sophisticated companies experience outages,” but he noted, “they can also recover fairly quickly.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting.