Global Glitch: Swaths Of Internet Go Down After Cloud Outage

Credit: Twitter.com

Dozens of websites briefly went offline around the globe Tuesday, including CNN, The New York Times and Britain’s government home page, after an outage at the cloud service Fastly.

San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 6 a.m. eastern time. About an hour later, the company said that the issue had been identified and a fix applied. Most of the sites soon appeared back online. Fastly is a content-delivery network or CDN. It provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing servers to many of the web's most popular sites. 

The incident illustrates how vital a small number of behind-the-scenes companies have become to running the internet. Fastly is indicating the outage appeared to be caused internally. Brief internet service outages are not uncommon and are only rarely the result of hacking or other mischief.

Still, major futures markets in the U.S. dipped sharply minutes after the outage, which came a month after a cyberattack forced the shutdown of the biggest fuel pipeline in the U.S.