If you recently attempted to access the Amazon, Reddit, or Spotify websites and received an error message, don’t worry; you are not alone. Several major websites, including the three mentioned above, are currently down. According to reports, the primary problem appears to be with the CDN, or content delivery network, that these websites use.
So, if you go to any website hosted on the Fastly CDN right now (as of writing this article), you will see the “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message pop up on your screen.
For those who are unfamiliar, a CDN, or content delivery network, is a network system that caches data in regional and localised proxy servers and data centres. There aren’t many CDNs that can handle the traffic demands of large websites like Amazon, Twitter, or Spotify. Fastly, for example, is a CDN that hosts many of the market’s major websites.
If you go to Fastly’s Service Status page right now, you’ll see several updates about today’s outage. Despite the fact that we do not know what caused the failure, the global disruption affected millions of users as well as businesses all over the world.
However, according to a few updates today, Fastly has identified the problem and is working on a solution. As a result, your favorite websites will be back online soon. In fact, some of them, such as Amazon and Reddit, have reopened.