For the first time in memorable history, an internet outage took down websites of major institutions, governments and businesses across the world in what experts described as a worrisome development. The multiple outages hit social media, government and news websites across the globe on Tuesday morning, with some reports pointing to a glitch at US-based cloud computing services provider Fastly.

Fastly said it was investigating “the potential impact to performance with our CDN services”, according to its website, referring to content delivery networks. Most of Fastly’s coverage areas were facing “degraded performance”, the website showed.

Separately, Amazon.com’s retail website also seemed to be down. Amazon was not immediately available to comment.

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Nearly 21 000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2 000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector.com.

Fastly said in a statement posted on its website that the problem was fixed shortly before 1pm South African time on Tuesday. Amazon’s Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector’s website.

Websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times and Bloomberg News also faced outages.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry