Several big websites around the world went down for about half an hour on June 8, because of a major issue with the content delivery network (CDN) of American cloud computing services provider Fastly. Reddit, Amazon, Twitch, Twitter, Spotify, Pinterest, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo and Shopify are some of the big names. Prominent news websites impacted were the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, CNN, and Verge, to name some. Most users would have seen a 503 error when trying to access these websites, indicating that the browser was not able to access the server. Fastly at 9:58 am UTC (3:28pm IST) said that it is investigating an issue with its CDN servers. As per DownDetector, users in India also faced trouble accessing Google services, including Search and Drive. Complaints also piled up for Stack Overflow, Shopify, PayPal, and Vimeo among others. Meanwhile, all Apple-related services, which are not hosted on Fastly CDN servers, seemed to be working fine. This is not the first time that an issue with CDN has caused many other dependent websites to go down. Previously in 2020, Cloudflare, another leading global cloud platform, had faced issues that impacted its client websites. The Cloudflare glitch resulted in sites such as Discord, Feedly, Politico, Shopify, and League of Legends going down.
