Reddit, Amazon, Twitch – Half the Internet Seems to Be Down and This Is Why

Reddit, Amazon, Twitch, Twitter, and several other websites and apps are part of a mass outage with user complaints from India and other countries spiking for each on DownDetector. The issue seems to have been caused by an outage at Fastly, a US-based cloud computing service provider that hosts Amazon and other websites affected by the outage. Fastly has also confirmed that its services are down and has said that it is investigating the issue. Over 1,000 Reddit and over 600 Twitch users have complained so far on Downdetector that the websites were not loading for them. Quora, GitHub, and Spotify are among the other websites that have been affected by the global outage.

Fastly has said that it is investigating an issue with its CDN (Content Delivery Network) servers. “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” says a notice on its websites, which does not elaborate on the cause of the service disruption.

As per DownDetector, users in India are also facing trouble accessing Google services, including Search and Drive. Complaints are also piling up for StackOverflow, Shopify, PayPal, and Vimeo among others. Globally, CNN, HBO Max, Hulu, and the New York Times times are also part of the Fastly outage. 

Meanwhile, all Apple-related services, which are not hosted on Fastly CDN servers, seemed to be working fine.CDN servers act as proxy servers and cache some data as close to the user’s location as possible to improve the performance, delivery, and availability of internet services across geographies. Companies such as Fastly run a global network of CDN services that help to vastly improve the loading time of Web pages.