Global Internet outage takes down many websites

The Internet outage appears to be the result of a problem with Fastly, a cloud computing company that provides key services to many websites

A major global Internet outage has knocked many websites offline.

The Internet outage appears to be the result of a problem with Fastly, a cloud computing company that provides key services to many websites

The websites affected include those of news outlets like Independent, New York Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, Evening Standard, Bloomberg and Le Monde as well as Reddit, eBay and Twitch.  Many of the websites displayed Error 503 messages.

What is a 503 error?

A 503 error message indicates that the browser is being blocked by something from accessing the target website's server. This could also mean that that something is wrong with the server supporting the website being accessed by the user.

This error could crop up if the server is still online but lacks sufficient capacity to support the number of requests hitting a website. This spike in traffic could be triggered by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. 

This could also happen due to scheduled server maintenance or by some unforeseen technical issue.