Twitch, Guardian, FT, Reddit, other big sites hit by mass web outage; here's what happened [details]

In an unusual incident on Tuesday, several popular websites were hit by a mass web outage. Affected sites include social media platforms, news sites and even some government websites. Several users took to Twitter to share screenshots of the error code while trying to access various websites.

Affected by this mass outage are websites including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The Age, AFR, SMH, BBC and Financial Times. The New York Times, also hit by the outage, seems to be working now, but the site response time is slow. Many websites are displaying "Error 503 service unavailable" message or other errors.

Here's what happened?

While many speculated a coordinated cyberattack behind the websites not being accessible in different parts of the world, the actual reason is CDN outage. A popular CDN provider, Fastly, confirmed that it was hit by an outage, causing many sites to go unresponsive.

"We're currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services," the firm said.

After a few minutes of downtime, the Fastly status page was updated saying "the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented." This means the websites should be working normally soon, if they are not already.