Mass outage as Reddit, Vimeo, Quora and news websites down

Government, news and social media websites across the globe have come back online after being hit by a widespread outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly.

High traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times were listed as experiencing problems by outage tracking website Downdetector.com on Tuesday, but appeared to be coming back up after outages that ranged from a few minutes to about an hour.

Fastly, one of the world's most widely-used cloud based content delivery network providers, said "the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return."

The company, which went public in 2019 and has a market capitalisation of $US5 billion, is far smaller than peers such as Amazon's AWS. It helps websites move content using less-congested routes, enabling them to reach consumers faster.

The United Kingdom's attorney-general earlier tweeted the country's main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.

The disruption may have caused issues for citizens booking COVID-19 vaccinations or reporting test results, the Financial Times reported.

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Fastly's website said most of its coverage areas had faced "Degraded Performance". Error messages on several of the websites pointed to Fastly problems.

News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the widespread outage when their websites failed to load up.

Popular tech website the Verge took to Google Docs to report news, while UK technology editor at the Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the problems.

Nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to Downdetector.com.

Amazon's Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector's website.

Websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times and Bloomberg News also faced outages.

Some Australian news websites were also temporarily affected.

with AAP

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