Technology
Why is the Internet not working?
MAJOR websites including Amazon, Twitter, Reddit and Spotify have gone down in a mass internet outage.
Problems began around 11am BST (6am ET) on Tuesday, according to online outage tracker DownDetector.
Read our Amazon global outage live blog for live updates…
Major websites including Amazon, Twitter, Reddit and Spotify have gone down[/caption]
Why is the Internet not working?
It’s unclear what’s causing the outage, though it’s suspected that the fault lies with Fastly.
The data centre provider, which runs a service designed to speed up loading times for websites, crashed earlier this morning.
Its service requires it to sit between its clients and their users, meaning any wide-scale failure is likely to block visitors from their web pages.
On its website, Fastly reported at 10:58am BST that it was investigating the issue, which it called a “global disruption”.
“Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return,” Fastly said.
The San Francisco-based company gave no indication as to when it expected its services to be fully restored.
How to check if the Internet is down?
Independent outage tracker DownDetector says that tens of thousands of people worldwide have reported issues with various web pages.
Visitors to affected sites are met with a “503 error” message, and are unable load the page. The error message warns of a “connection failure”.
Has the internet been down before?
In 2019, many major websites were affected when Verizon accidentally rerouted IP packages.
Systems around the world were automatically updated and connections for sites including Facebook crashed.
In March, Virgin Media broadband went down for thousands of customers as households struggled to get online.
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At the height of the problem, outage tracker DownDetector reported complaints from more than 2,000 people.
The problem appeared to start just after 8am and it came as millions of people continued to work from home due to coronavirus.
Meanwhile in January, Sky broadband went down for thousands of customers.
