Internet Glitch Hits Thousands of Websites

A glitch has taken down thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe. They were hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to U.S.-based cloud company Fastly.

Numerous popular sites. like Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times went down. They came back up after outages that lasted from a few minutes to around an hour.

Fastly, one of the world's most used cloud-based content delivery network providers, reported a disruption from a service configuration without further explanation. "Our global network is coming back online," Fastly said after the incident.

The United Kingdom's attorney general tweeted that the country's main government website was down. The disruption may have caused issues for citizens booking COVID-19 vaccinations or reporting test results, the Financial Times reported.

News outlet websites, including the Financial Times, the Guardian and Bloomberg News also faced outages. News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the outage when their websites failed to load up.