Some of the world’s biggest online media platforms including The New York Times, The Guardian and Le Monde, have been temporarily taken offline. A cause is not yet known, but it’s thought a server outage could be at play.
Users trying to access sites such as The New Yorker, The Independent and the Financial Times’ FT at around 11 a.m. GMT were greeted with a 503 service error.
Users of social media platforms including Reddit, Twitch and Pinterest have also reported outages on those sites.
It is believed the source of the outages is a disruption to a key content delivery network, thought to be Fastly. Fastly is also down, showing a blank page saying “connection failure.”
The Guardian's website and app are currently being affected by a wider internet outage and will be back as soon as possible
— The Guardian (@guardian) June 8, 2021
Outlets that are currently returning errors include The New York Times, The Guardian, Forbes, The Atlantic, Reddit, The New Yorker and French newspaper Le Monde, one of the few major non-U.S. sites that appears to be affected.
The British Government’s official website, gov.uk, is also currently down. However, the United States and France’s official government websites appear to be working.
The outages are believed to be local, with some websites working intermittently while users in certain geographical locations, such as Berlin, have reported no issues at all for these sites.
Unable to deliver the news what is now the traditional way, some affected media sites, such as the Guardian and The Verge, have resorted to innovative ways of keeping their readers updated with the latest headlines – including that of their own outage. The Guardian’s UK technology editor, Alex Hern, has been using a Twitter thread as a “formal liveblog for the Fastly outage,” he reported. The Verge, meanwhile, has pivoted to a Google Docs page.
Vast chunks of the internet are offline, including The Verge. Until we’re back, we’re reporting to you live out of Google Docs. Here’s what we know so far about the outage: https://t.co/4b1p2qhYif
— The Verge (@verge) June 8, 2021
Websites that are still online include the BBC, Los Angeles Times, El Pais, South China Morning Post, Al Jazeera, Daily Mail, The Sun and Buzzfeed.
More to come.
