massive decline in news portals and sites like Amazon, Twitch and Reddit

Dozens of digital services, social networking and media webpages around the world were on this Tuesday morning out of order for more than an hour, according to user reports on Twitter and specialist portal reports Failure detector.

Reports from the specialist portal Downdetector point to cuts to digital services and social networks such as Amazon and Twitch, the Reddit platform, the PayPal payment system, as well as many media, around 6:58 a.m. in Argentina.

It also affected Google, Movistar, Github, and Spotify.

The portal, which includes data from user reports, points out that the problem could be with the US IT service provider Quickly

“We are currently studying the potential impact on the performance of our CDN services, ”they reported from Fastly minutes before 7 am in Argentina.

The outage lasted just over an hour until they announced in a new report that they identified “a service configuration that has caused disruption to our POPs around the world and we have disabled those settings. , our global network is back online “.

Media websites such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, Le Monde and El País were not accessible, among others.

“Quickly declared ‘investigation’ into an anomaly, without further clarification,” Le Monde said on its Twitter account.

They explained that the flaw “appears to be from Fastly, an American company that provides ‘content delivery network’ services” and that the “task of this type of service provider is to speed up the distribution and downloading of pages for Internet users “.

Official institutions such as the White House and the British government have also been affected. The Web www.gov.uk, which brings together the various departments of the British executive and allows official demarches to be carried out, issued an error message and declared itself unavailable.

While trying to view the White House page a message appeared saying that the portal “was not working”.

Finally, the pages slowly began to be operational again.

What is a content delivery network (CDN)?

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, a key part of the Internet infrastructure. Technical issues of this magnitude at a major Internet infrastructure service provider are causing widespread disruption to millions of websites using its services, like the one that occurred this morning.

Content delivery networks like Fasly maintain global networks of servers to improve the performance and availability of web services. CDNs act as proxy servers and cache certain data as close to the end user as possible. For example, digital media content like uploaded ones are often cached on a CDN server close to the user, so you don’t have to search the origin server every time a user loads a web page.

The incident with Fastly happened shortly before noon, according to the company’s state of services information page. Less than an hour later, the service was already reporting that the problem had been identified and that a solution had already been implemented.

In addition to Fastly, the most popular CDNs include Cloudflare, CloudFront on Amazon Web Services, and Akamai, one of the pioneer services.

AFG