Multiple Major Websites face ‘Error 503’ Issue

On Tuesday morning, many major websites were hit by Internet outrages. It affected many famous news websites and social media sites. Some of these websites include Amazon, Twitch, Pinterest and Spotify.

Many global news websites such as the New York Times, CNN and the Guardian were impacted. Even Quora was inaccessible for Indian users. Some of the other sites that were impacted are PayPal, Vimeo, GitHub, Hulu, Stack Overflow and HBO Max. The home pages of these websites was sowing an ‘Error 503’ message.

The Guardian’s UK technology correspondent Alex Hern tweeted informing that this internet outrage has been traced to a failure by Fastly in a content delivery network.

In a thread he said, “As well as bringing down some websites entirely, the failure also broke specific sections of other services, such as the servers for Twitter that host the social network’s emoji.”

“Fastly, a cloud computing services provider, has been identified as the cause of the problem. The company runs an “edge cloud”, which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic.”, Hern added.

Later, Fastly, on its status page, said that the problem has been identified and a fix has been implemented. It also informed that customers may experience increased origin load because of the return of the global services.