Web outage leads to bizarre conspiracy theories as QAnon celebrates massive server going dark
Did you wake up to an unusual number of websites being down? It's certainly not just you. Some of the highly trafficked news platforms and eCommerce sites went dark on the morning of Tuesday, June 8.
The sites affected amid the outage include CNN, The New York Times, Reddit, the Guardian, Financial Times, and BBC in addition to eCommerce and streaming entertainment sites PayPal, Hulu, HBOMax, Spotify, Twitch, and GitHub. AlterNet was also affected.
According to Matt Taylor, Product Manager at Financial Times, the massive outage has something to do with the sites' content delivery network (CDN), Fastly. Describing the outage as a "global CDN disruption" on its status page, Fastly wrote, "We're currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services."
Fastly, the CDN provider, is having a massive outage, resulting in Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit, The Guardian, and the FT returning 503 errors.\n\nhttps://status.fastly.com/— Matt 'TK' Taylor (@Matt 'TK' Taylor) 1623146432
Shortly after reports began circulating about Fastly, QAnon believers also began weighing in with their bizarre take on the reason for the outage. While the outage could have been an isolated incident, some believe there is more to the situation and that it has a deeper meaning.
Q people are excited about the Fastly outagepic.twitter.com/7l99I8Ni3Y— Rohan Pearce (@Rohan Pearce) 1623147810
pic.twitter.com/WzEBk6sZhX— Bone Ocean (@Bone Ocean) 1623149063
Maybe retaliation for this?https://apnews.com/article/europe-technology-a6ac691e26be2efc6e2f4a6974117536?fbclid=iwar2qmy0vk93dl4rrmecwdhsny8mnpo4_wneqgjlxag_9owixxeyodmugndm\u00a0\u2026— Felix (@Felix) 1623149623
Fastly is an online resource that typically helps sites with larger flows of traffic distribute content across smaller networks. While many sites may be impacted when a CDN goes dark, its typically not a difficult issue to resolve, according to Axios.
As of 7:00 a.m., Fastly confirmed on its site that the issue has been resolved. However, it will continue to monitor activity. "The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied," Fastly wrote. "Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return."
