Internet Outage Brings Down Several Major Retail and News Websites

Earlier this morning at 6.44 AM (Eastern Time), many governments and news websites in the U.S. and Europe were inaccessible, with at least one internet outage tracker reporting widespread disruptions. Sites like the U.K. government's main public-services portal, major U.S. and European news outlets, such as the New York Times, CNN, and Le Monde, were shut down.

Down Detector, an internet services tracker, reported the spike in outages. Many social media users described widespread outages in various regions. Fastly, an operator of the network service said issues with its services, though it was unclear whether the broader website outages were related. The company stated that it is currently investigating potential impact to performance with its CDN services.

Fastly's status page indicated the company had identified a problem with its service, stating that a fix was being implemented. Fastly also observed traffic volume to drop by about 75 percent, according to network monitoring company Kentik Inc. Most of the websites went down and displayed a simple error message in plain text, which said "Error 503 Service Unavailable," along with other codes.