Fastly glitch causes global internet outage

A technical glitch at cloud-services provider Fastly Inc. on the morning of June 8 caused several websites in the U.S. and Europe to briefly go offline.

In a tweet, Fastly said it disabled a "service configuration" on its content delivery network that triggered disruptions across its points of presence globally. The company on its service status page declared the disruption resolved by 8:41 a.m. ET after observing all of its services had recovered.

The disruption began at around 5:50 a.m. ET and lasted for about an hour, with users getting server errors or site loading issues, according to ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

Affected sites included the U.K. government's main public-services portal and news outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, and French daily Le Monde, Dow Jones Newswires reported.

Fastly CEO Joshua Bixby reportedly said the outage was not due to a cyberattack.

Angelique Medina, director of product marketing at ThousandEyes, said the internet relies on a few content delivery network providers, such that a disruption on one of them can have a "massive impact" on web users worldwide.

"By caching web content close to users for maximum performance and availability, they're critical to how we access digital services," Medina said.

This is the latest disruption affecting a major platform. In December 2020, Alphabet Inc. unit Google LLC suffered a 47-minute outage that took down Gmail, Google Docs and other related services. Microsoft Corp. services including Office365 also went down for several minutes on Dec. 17.