Fastly down: What caused the outage?

CONTENT delivery network Fastly has been experiencing outages which is causing chaos across the internet.

The network, which helps a group of servers provide speedy delivery of online content, has been disrupted since this morning.

Is Fastly down?

Fastly was down for the majority of this morning.

Fortunately, the server has announced the issue has been identified and fixed.

Their incident report said now "customers may experience increased origin load as global services return".

The self-described "edge cloud platform" provides vital behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web’s high profile sites, by helping them to store, or “cache,” content in servers around the world so that it’s closer to users.

What caused the outage?

There was a lot of speculation about what caused the outage before the service was fixed.

Taking to Twitter, Fastly explained that they had "identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally."

They assured users they have now "disabled that configuration" and that "our global network is coming back online."

The official source of the outage has not yet been revealed.

What websites are affected?

Among the websites reportedly affected are news outlets, music platforms, and money sending apps.

Amazon, Spotify, The Guardian, New York Times, Independent, Financial Times, CNN, Buzzfeed and French newspaper Le Monde have all been displaying error messages to users.

Other popular websites including Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe and gov.uk have been experiencing issues.

Most websites are now functioning normally.

DownDetector, which monitors the performance of websites and web apps, said around 4,000 people reported issues logging into Amazon.

Meanwhile, 3,500 were unable to visit Twitch.tv and almost 10,000 complained about problems accessing Reddit.