Internet down: Several global Australian news sites down including BBC, New York Times, SMH, Age
Juan J. Monroe 
A number of news sites were shut down on Tuesday evening, including the New York Times, CNN and the BBC. Australian sites were also affected.
Customers have been warned they could still face problems after a slew of national and international sites crashed in unison on Tuesday night, including the New York Times, CNN and the BBC.
The Verge, Financial Times and Bloomberg also experienced blackouts that lasted nearly an hour, while locally The Guardian, Nine, SMH and The Age were affected, including Channel 10 and 10play online. Users have also reported issues with 7Plus.
The blackout went as far as the White House websites as well as the UK government website – gov.UK.
Retail giant Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, Pinterest, Twitch, PayPal and Shopify have also been affected.
It appears News Corp sites were unaffected by the outage.
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Internet sleuths suggested a “big attack,” but the outage was caused by San Francisco-based data center provider Fastly.
Most users received “Error 503” messages when attempting to access sites and although a fix was applied, users were warned that they may “continue to experience a decrease in the success rate of the cache and an increase in the original load as global services return ”.
“When huge blackouts like this hit the internet, they’re usually blamed on a central service provider like AWS,” said The Verge, who was forced to communicate via Google docs.
“In this case, it looks like the cause of the problem is with a company called Fastly, which provides CDN (Content Delivery Network) services to a lot of websites.
The Age has confirmed that Nine publications technical teams, “including this credits, have confirmed that the issue is with CDN provider Fastly.”
CDNs are networks of “graphically remote” servers, which “help minimize delays in loading web page content, by reducing the physical distance between servers and users,” according to The Australian’s David swan.
These servers are located in “data centers” around the world, connected via submarine cables.
“Fastly is one of four hosting service providers that handle CDNs, Akamai, Cloudflare, and Amazon Web Services are the other three.
On its website, Quickly said, “The problem has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience an increase in the original load with the return of global services.
The sites started to come back, but Fastly didn’t indicate what happened in the first place.
