Several major websites were facing a global outage on June 8. The home pages of these websites showed an ‘Error 503’ message.
Websites of the United Kingdom government, Reddit, video live streaming Twitch and those of major news outlets such as The New York Times, BBC News, The Financial Times and The Guardian were not accessible.
Quora, Shopify and Vimeo were some of the other websites facing the outage. Amazon Web Services was also facing an outage. "User reports indicate problems at Amazon Web Services," DownDetector said.
Data from Google Trends showed that internet searches for "503 error" started surging at 3.14 pm Indian Standard Time.
Read: Twitter abuzz with reactions on global internet outage
A glitch at content delivery network provider Fastly was thought to be the reason behind the global outage, according to news reports.
"A fix was applied at 10:36 UTC. Customers may continue to experience decreased cache hit ratio and increased origin load as global services return," San Francisco-based Fastly said on its status website.
In an earlier update it said, “We are continuing to investigate this issue,” referring to the incident as a “Global CDN Disruption”.
“The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” Fastly said at 4.14 pm IST.
About 13 minutes later, the company said that “a fix has been applied”. However, it added that customers “may experience increased origin load as global services return”.
Fastly, a cloud computing servics provider, was founded by Artur Bergman in 2010. The company went public in 2019.
Screenshot of the error message as seen on one of the global news website’s home page
What is Error 503?
The ‘503 Service Unavailable’ message refers to an error response code indicating that the server is not ready to handle the request. Common causes are a server that is down for maintenance or that is overloaded.
Read: Explained | What is Error 503? And how it caused a major global internet shutdown
