Websites affected included Reddit, eBay, Twitch, The Guardian, Financial Times, Independent, New York Times and the Evening Standard
A number of major websites, including the UK’s official government website, have been hit by an outage at global website hosting service Fastly.
For around an hour this morning, those logging into to gov.uk, as well as a raft of other sites, were faced with a message saying “503 Service Unavailable” or similar.
Other sites that have been affected include news outlets The Guardian, Financial Times, Independent, Evening Standard, New York Times, Bloomberg and Le Monde, as well as the self-proclaimed front page of the internet Reddit, popular shopping site eBay and the live-streaming platform Twitch.
This comes after the trade union Prospect is now calling for the UK government to give employees a legally binding “right to disconnect”, with many of its members warning that their mental health is being compromised.
Fastly, which is a global online content delivery network (CDN), had reported an outage across its entire network, affecting sites that use its platform.
The US-based company earlier confirmed that it has found the issue and that its global network is beginning to come back online, and by around 11.50am BST, a number of services now appear to have been restored, but loading times on the sites are still slow, with access to them being seemingly intermittent.
It is now understood that the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, a branch of GCHQ, was aware of this incident and had briefly investigated it. But there is not thought to be anything malicious about the outages.
There had earlier been reports of some other websites being down too, including PayPal, CNN and Spotify, all of which appear to now be up and running as normal.
It comes as hundreds of thousands of people between the ages of 25-29 became eligible for their COVID-19 vaccines, and were already experiencing some troubles with booking their jabs online.
This comes after people aged between 25 to 29 in England will now be able to book their COVID-19 vaccinations starting from Tuesday morning. Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced the extension to the country’s COVID-19 vaccination programme in a statement to MPs in the Commons.
News site The Verge has since responded by resorting to using a Google Doc to report on the outage, after being affected by the issue themselves, while other outlets tweeted to say they had gone down.
The disruption has led some to question the wisdom of having so much internet infrastructure in the hands of a few companies.
Jake Moore, a cyber-specialist at security firm ESET said: “this highlights the importance and significance of these vast hosting companies and what they represent.”
Adam Smith, a software testing expert with the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, said that outages with content delivery networks “highlight the growing ecosystem of complex and coupled components that are involved in delivering internet services”.
“Because of this, outages are increasingly hitting multiple sites and services at the same time.”