Outage affects several major streaming providers
By MixDex Article may include affiliate links
After a major cloud content platform experienced an issue with a configuration, several major streaming platforms experienced downtime or reduced performance for some users June 8, 2021.
The issues began around 5:30 a.m. that morning and affected, according to published reports, Hulu, HBO Max and Spotify users in the Americas, Europe, Asian and parts of South Africa.
In addition, the Amazon owned Twitch service was also affected (as was Amazon’s shopping main website) as were countless other sites and services, including major news outlets and sites such as Reddit and Pinterest.
The issue was eventually tracked down by Fastly, the company who provides content delivery services for the affected websites, and service began to be restored in just over an hour. Some sites continued to report issues later into the day.
Fastly is designed to help websites speed up the delivery of their content — typically by storing pages and files on servers around the world, meaning the data has less distance to travel.
Streaming services are particularly data heavy since they, by definition, have to deliver high quality video, which typically requires very large amounts of data moving across the internet, to user’s devices.
Fastly, for its part, issued an apology for the issues and worked quickly to resolve the issue for its clients. While large scale outages affecting major services are generally rare, technical issues at Amazon and Google have caused similar issues in the past.