Configuration issue at Fastly takes down major news websites, including CNN and NYT

By MixDex Article may include affiliate links

Several major news websites, including CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times experienced outages Tuesday, June 8, 2021 due to a technical issue at a content delivery network provider.

The issues began around 5:30 a.m. eastern time Tuesday morning — with variety of error messages show on browsers instead of the normal news headlines.

The problem was later isolated to Fastly, a cloud service provider that stores copies of content on its clients’ web pages and content files to make them load better through a content delivery network, or CDN.

Fastly later revealed that an errant server configuration was the root of the problem and began restoring service around 6:39 a.m. eastern. This type of update has lead to other significant outages in the past, including even larger outages caused by issues at Google and Amazon.

Some sites continued to experience issues later in the day while others were able to switch to a different CDN provider to avoid significant downtime.

Most of the issues appeared to be centered around users trying to access sites from the Americas, Europe, Asian and parts of South Africa.

The issue affected other major websites and services as well, including HBO Max, Hulu, Spotify, Amazon, Target and dozens more.

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.