Internet outage hits major websites like Amazon, CNN

Users in Singapore and around the globe were unable to access several major websites such as Amazon, Reddit and video streaming platform Twitch for about an hour yesterday evening, after a cloud computing network that the websites rely on was hit by technical issues.

Several major international news sites like CNN, Financial Times, The Guardian and The New York Times were also affected, as was the British government website gov.uk

Attempts to access these websites returned the error code 503, meaning "service unavailable", and various other error messages.

Singapore's government websites and major news outlets here were not affected by the outage.

The affected sites are linked to a content delivery network called Fastly, which confirmed the outage on its website at about 6pm Singapore time yesterday and reported that it was investigating impacts on the performance of its services.

According to Fastly's status page, its network was facing issues that caused "degraded performance" across all of its 81 data centres in these regions: North America, South America, Europe, South Africa, India and the Asia-Pacific, including two data centres in Singapore.

At about 6.45pm, Fastly reported that it had identified the issue and was implementing a fix.

The affected websites started to come back online about an hour after the disruptions were reported.

Some netizens speculated that the incident was due to a deliberate attack.

On Twitter, the hashtag #cyberattack trended shortly after the disruptions were first reported.

When contacted, a spokesman for Fastly said the outage was instead due to a configuration error that triggered disruptions across its network, adding that the company had since disabled the configuration.

"Our global network is coming back online," the spokesman said.

Content delivery networks like Fastly are groups of servers located around the world that work together to provide fast Internet access. Other examples are Cloudflare and Amazon CloudFront.

These networks are key pieces of Internet infrastructure that allow users to access the data servers that are physically closest to them, instead of having to access a single main server. This allows content to be loaded more quickly.

However, it also means that outages at popular service providers like Fastly, which have many major customers relying on them, can result in widespread disruptions.