Sites including Reddit, BBC, Gov.UK, CNN and FT go down amid outage

A number of popular websites including Reddit, CNN, BBC, Gov.UK, Financial Times and the Guardian have become unavailable, with visitors reporting Error 503 when trying to visit them.

The errors have reportedly been caused by an outage impacting the Fastly content delivery network who first reported issues on their status page at 09.58 UTC.

Investigating – We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.

Fastly is a cloud computing services provider. They offer online services to a number of different and well-known websites including a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN allows websites to store their content (i.e. webpages and images) on the CDN network so they can be retrieved faster and more efficiently by visitors based on their geographical location.

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This is to prevent the website’s own servers and resources from becoming overwhelmed by high demand. However if the CDN network itself suffers an outage it can affect all (or many) websites who use that particular service.

Similar outages occurred when Amazon Web Services – another cloud computing services provider – suffered issues in November 2020, taking a number of websites down along with it.

UPDATE: Fastly has claimed to have identified the issue and are currently implementing a fix. Most sites affected including BBC are now back online.
UPDATE: Fastly has said it has now applied a fix.