(NEW YORK) — A slew of high-traffic websites — ranging from news outlets to social media platforms — suffered simultaneous global outages early Tuesday morning.
Most of the websites impacted were back up and running after the temporary hit, and the issues were linked to Fastly, a cloud-computing company that supports these sites. The company has not disclosed the cause of the outage.
Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack, Hulu, HBO Max, PayPal, Vimeo and Shopify were among the pages to report issues Tuesday. News outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and The Financial Times were also impacted, as well as the site for the British government.
Nearly 40 websites were hit with outages at some point early Tuesday morning, according to data from the tracking site Down Detector, though it’s not clear if all of them were related to the Fastly incident.
Fastly reported just before 6 a.m. ET that it was investigating a “potential impact to performance” with its content-delivery services. Within an hour it said it had identified the issue and was implementing a fix.
The fix was applied at 6:36 a.m. ET, Fastly said, and approximately an hour later the company reported that the issue had been resolved globally.
“Fastly has observed recovery of all services and has resolved this incident,” the company wrote on an incident report landing page.
Though the incident was resolved quickly, it sowed widespread confusion and exposed vulnerabilities of critical websites at a time when high-profile cybersecurity breaches are on the rise.
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