New Delhi/San Francisco: In a massive Internet outage, several popular websites including leading news portals such as The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN International, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Vox, the Financial Times and the BBC went off the grid globally on Tuesday.
Websites of Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, GitHub, Hulu, HBO Max and Amazon.com were also down.
"Error 503 Service Unavailable," was the message that appeared on most of the affected websites.
Websites of foreign wires such as Bloomberg, Reuters, Associated Press are, however, running fine.
It appears that websites, which are using services of US-based CDN provider Fastly, are experiencing the outage. Fastly confirmed it was facing an outage on its status website.
A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
"We are continuing to investigate this issue. We're currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services," Fastly said.
Most of Fastly's coverage areas were facing "Degraded Performance", the website showed.
Later, the company said: "The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return."
It was unclear if the glitch was due to a cyber-attack.
Fastly describes itself as "an edge cloud platform." It provides vital behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web's high profile sites, by helping them them to store, or cache, content in servers around the world so that it's closer to users.
Some visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com. Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message while visits to the New York Times and UK government's gov.uk site returned an "Error 503 Service Unavailable" message, along with the line Varnish cache server," which is a technology that Fastly is built on.
Other popular websites affected were gov.uk, Quora, PayPal, Shopify and others.
Nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector.com.
Amazon's Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector's website.
(With inputs from Reuters and IANS)