Media E-commerce official website of British government offline

London/Washington – Many websites of media, e-commerce, entertainment and social networking companies, along with the official website gov.uk, of the British government, went offline on Tuesday morning. It was revealed that a technical glitch in the network of Cloud Computing Services provider company Fastly was responsible for the problem. With a significant increase in ransomware attacks in the United States and Europe, this incident drew the world’s attention.

On Tuesday morning, websites started going offline, one after the other, along with the UK government website, gov.uk. People attempting to visit the websites were consistently getting an error message. Along with the official website of the UK government, websites of media companies BBC, Guardian, Independent, Financial Times, New York Times, CNN, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal were also not accessible.

Websites of the leading e-commerce companies like Amazon, eBay and Shopify, along with social media websites like Reddit, Twitter, Vimeo, Fandom and Quora also went offline. The problem at the Cloud Computing Service provider, Fastly, was the cause of website failures on such a big scale. Many leading websites use the Edge Cloud Computing platform provided by Fastly. This platform has a firewall providing the necessary security for the information and pictures on the websites. On Tuesday, major glitches developed in the Content Delivery Network of the company. The reasons for the glitches are not known. The company released this information after the websites started going offline.

The company clarified that the problem was resolved within a few hours. Although the websites were up, the speed was prolonged. In the last eight months, this is the third instance of the global internet being rocked due to failure in services of one single company. Last year, in November and December, the fault in the networks of Amazon and Google had hit many websites using their services.