Internet services around the world have taken a hit. Several news publications, websites, social media platforms have gone offline due to the sudden virtual outage. Users visiting websites like The Guardian, New York Times, Reddit, etc., are seeing Error 503. Even the United Kingdom government’s website is down showing the same error message. The ‘503 Service Unavailable’ message refers to an error response code indicating that the webserver is not ready to handle the request. The reason could be due to downtime for maintenance or cannot take the incoming load. The reason behind the outage is not known at the moment. Let’s take a look at more details on why users are seeing Error 503.
Error 503 messages reported by users worldwide
Several users around the world are unable to access websites on the internet. Users have reported an “Error 503” message upon visiting certain websites.
Oof, @fastly outage this morning is affecting several websites, including @nytimes, @verge and @VICE
— Joseph Kohlmann (he/him) is forming a union! (@jkohlmann) June 8, 2021
Fastly edge platform is having problems, which means a big part of the internet is having problems. This includes Twitter. Even https://t.co/DPssWnrDVs itself is unavailable in many locations. pic.twitter.com/bKpeWrp4xt
— @mikko (@mikko) June 8, 2021
Websites like Reddit, The Independent UK, New York Times, The Verge are down at the time of writing this. The UK Government’s website is also showing the same error to users. The underlying issue could be due to a glitch at the content delivery network (CDN) provider Fastly, according to a TechCrunch report. The CDN provider confirmed the outage on its status website. “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services,” Fastly said.
After nearly 45 minutes of downtime, the CDN reported that it has found the underlying issue and a fix is being implemented. Websites like Reddit, CNN, The Verge, Spotify, The New York Times, BBC, Twitch, GitHub, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, etc., seem to have been affected by the outage. Some of these websites were back online after the brief outage.
CDNs are an essential part of the internet infrastructure. They run global networks of the server to improve the performance and availability of web services.
