Internet outage hits major news outlets

An outage yesterday shut down websites including The New York Times, CNN, the Financial Times and dozens of others.

The Wall Street Journal’s Sam Schechner and Parmy Olson reported:

Dozens of websites in the U.S. and Europe briefly went dark Tuesday, victims of an internal glitch at a major cloud-service provider and the latest example of how a problem at a single player in the internet’s piping can have outsize repercussions.

Sites including the U.K. government’s main public-services portal and several major U.S. and European news outlets, such as CNN, the New York Times NYT -1.46% and Le Monde, were inaccessible to at least some users for roughly an hour, beginning around 6 a.m. EDT.

Jordan Valinsky and David Goldman from CNN wrote:

The problem was caused by an outage at Fastly (FSLY), a cloud service provider. The company said on its service status website (which was working) Tuesday morning it had identified the problem and fixed the issue. Service for sites and apps started to be restored around 7 a.m. ET, although Fastly said some customers may experience longer load times as a residual effect of the problem.

Bloomberg’s John Ainger focused on the effect of the outage on markets:

Ten-year Treasury yields fell as much as three basis points to 1.54%, the lowest level in over a month, before paring the drop. Websites including the New York Times, Bloomberg News and Reddit were unavailable after services from content-delivery network Fastly Inc. went down on Tuesday.

Other bond markets followed the move, with German and British bonds also rallying.

“It seems to be being blamed on tech issues rather than a cyber attack,” said Patrick O’Donnell, a money manager at Aberdeen Standard Investments. “Either way, U.S. fixed income had been trading quite well anyway and I imagine that’ll continue.