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Several news websites including The Guardian , The New York Times , Financial Times and Bloomberg News crashed earlier this afternoon following a major Internet outage. The websites displayed “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message.
“ The Guardian ’s website and app are currently being affected by a wider internet outage and will be back as soon as possible,” the U.K-based publication said in a tweet.
Also read: Fact Box| Fastly, the cloud company behind a global internet outage
Other websites including Reddit, BBC News, Buzzfeed, Vox Media, and Amazon Web Services were also affected.
The mass outage is said to have been caused by an issue with Fastly, a U.S-based cloud platform that powers several internet companies, according to Alex Hern, U.K. technology editor at The Guardian. “The increasing centralisation of Internet infrastructure in the hands of a few large companies means that single points of failure can result in sweeping outages,” he said in a tweet.
“The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” Fastly updated in its status page.
Update at 6 p.m. IST: Services of multiple websites including Fastly have been restored.
