Numerous websites were unavailable Tuesday after an apparent widespread outage at the cloud services company Fastly. Dozens of high-traffic websites, including the New York Times, CNN, Amazon, Twitter, Target, Spotify, and the UK government's home page, couldn't be reached, per the AP and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visitors trying to access CNN.com, for example, got a message that said: "Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com." Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, said: "Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service."
San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 6am ET, noting in repeated updates on its website that it was "continuing to investigate the issue." It confirmed that the outage was tied to problems with content delivery network services. By 7am ET, "the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied," reporter Matt Taylor tweeted, and many of the sites appeared to be functioning normally again. There may still be delays throughout the morning, however, Taylor notes: "What's possible now is a bunch of sites will suffer from a second outage due to lack of caching as their application servers have to suddenly catch up."
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