Dozens of the most popular websites have gone offline. From Amazon to Ebay, Twitch.tv to Reddit, PayPal, and even UK Government online resources and HMRC – none of these are able to load this morning. Those trying to access these websites are being presented by a series of error messages, including “connection failure” and “Error 503 Service Unavailable”.
What links all of these different websites? Well, our best guess right now is a CDN. A Content Distribution Network, or CDN, is a network of proxy servers and their data centres distributed across a wide area. The goal of this set-up is to provide high performance to end users by ensuring that whatever service they’re trying to access – whether it be a Californian website or Australian retailer – is always spatially relatively close to the end users’ computer. In other words, it means that not all of your data is being beamed back to and from Seattle every time you try to access an Amazon webpage just because the company has its headquarters there.
Fastly, a hugely popular CDN for a number of vast websites, has encountered an error right now, leaving dozens of household names, like Amazon, Ebay, Twitch.tv offline for users.
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