It’s not just you or the sites you visit. A huge part of the internet went down earlier tonight, and everything from entertainment providers to video services to news sites were impacted.
It appears (though this hasn’t been 100% confirmed) that an outage at Fastly, the CDN (Content Delivery Network) provider that powers...well, a huge swathe of the internet, is to blame. For around 45 minutes an “issue” with the company’s services resulted in downtime for everything from Twitch to Reddit to Amazon, CNN to The Verge, the BBC and The Guardian, with all those sites (and countless more) returning either 503 or “connection failure” errors.
As you may have also noticed, if you were trying to read Kotaku.com and could at any point during the outage access the site at all, we were also not doing great, with images failing to either upload or display.
Cruelly, Twitter was unaffected by the outages.
Fastly’s own error logs show that it took 46 minutes from the “issue” being first discovered to it being fixed, and all those sites listed above all returned to full functionality at the same time, so hopefully you were able to get something constructive done during that time.
We’ll bring you more as we’re able to confirm the scale and confirmed cause of the outages.