A major outage today has affected a number of high-profile websites including Amazon, Reddit, and Twitch, reports the BBC. The U.K. government website – gov.uk – was also down, as were the Financial Times, the Guardian, and the New York Times. Cloud computing provider Fastly said it was behind the problems. In a statement, it said: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruption across our POPs (points of presence) globally and have disabled that configuration.” The issues began around 11 a.m. BST and lasted for an hour. Other affected websites included CNN and streaming sites Twitch and Hulu. The outage also broke parts of other services, including Twitter’s emojis. Fastly runs what is known as an “edge cloud”, which is designed to speed loading times for websites and protect them from denial-of-service attacks. Similar problems have also affected Amazon Web Services and Cloudfare in the past, two other huge cloud computing firms. The disruption has led some to question the wisdom of having so much internet infrastructure in the hands of a few companies.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57399628
