Cloud service Fastly crashes Reddit and major media websites

If you tried accessing major social media platforms like Reddit or Twitch, or news giants like New York Times, the Guardian, or the Financial Times, you have received the Error 503 Service Unavailable error message.

We don’t have any information about the cause of the outage but the responsible party for the general crash was Fastly, a cloud service company.

Who was affected by the crash?

Aside from the above-mentioned services, the downtime was also felt all through government websites and you have also probably had problems shopping on Amazon or using PayPal.

The websites could not be accessed from anywhere in the world for more than an hour, so the problem was pretty important.

However, you didn’t experience any problems using other social media websites like Facebook or Twitter. Microsoft Teams and Slack were also not touched by this problem.

According to the latest announcement at 11:57 UTC on the Fastly’s Service Status page, the issues seem to have been resolved:

A fix was applied at 10:36 UTC. Customers may continue to experience decreased cache hit ratio and increased origin load as global services return.

We don’t know yet if it was a security issue or just a technical problem but last year, Fastly acquired the cybersecurity company Signal Sciences for $775 million to strengthen its defenses.

Fastly’s cloud security services come with denial-of-service attack protection together with bot mitigation and a web application firewall. 

At this moment, the outage seems to have been resolved but we will get back to you if any other information resurfaces.

The latest big outage that we covered implied the Google Mobile services and it affected millions around the world.

Were you affected by this outage? Leave us a comment with your thought in the dedicated section below.