Global News Outage
Reddit, BBC, SMH, Financial Review go down among global tech outage
Major news outlets including The Australian Financial Review, The New York Times and BBC and other popular websites were hit by a mass web outage on Tuesday evening, reports AFR‘s Miranda Ward.
Websites around the world began showing “Error 503 Service Unavailable” messages at about 8pm (AEST), with some showing the more specific “Fastly error” pointing to an outage at content delivery network Fastly.
The Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Guardian Australia were amongst Australian news websites struck by the outage while major sites like Reddit, Paypal, Shopify, Twitch and Pinterest were also brought down by the technical issues. The UK government’s entire website also went down.
Fastly said on its status page that it was investigating the issue, which also brought down Australian catch-up television services including 9Now and 10Play.
Fastly outage: News, government sites around world crash after glitch
A mass internet outage sent websites around the world down on Tuesday night, including sites for the White House, the British government and international media, reports News Corp’s David Swan and Sophie Elsworth.
Internationally the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Financial Times were all impacted and unable to show any content.
The sites were all offline at around 8pm, but shortly before 9pm many appeared to be resuming services as normal.
In Europe, France’s Le Monde was also displaying an error message, as was Japan’s Nikkei and major social media site Reddit, gaming-service Twitch and image-sharing site Pinterest.
Sky News was affected, with no videos playing on its website. 7Plus was also down for a short while. Nine’s streaming service 9Now’s streaming service was also hit by the outage but was eventually restored.
Widespread Internet Outage Affects Major Websites
Several major websites, including those of the British government, The New York Times, CNN, The Financial Times and The Guardian, was inaccessible for many users on Tuesday morning, reports The New York Times’ Adam Satariano and Jenny Gross.
According to Downdetector.com, which tracks internet disruptions, sites including Etsy, Hulu, PayPal, Reddit, Twitch and Twitter also reported problems.
Many of the affected sites appeared to have been restored after a little less than an hour.
The outage was connected to Fastly, a provider of cloud computing services used by scores of companies to improve the speed and reliability of their websites. Fastly later said on its website that the issue had been identified and that a fix was being made.
Fastly works on technology known as a content delivery network, which is a highly distributed network of servers used to reduce the distance between a server and user, and increase the speed at which a website loads.
Websites back online after Fastly-linked glitch takes down internet
Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were coming back online on Tuesday after getting hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to U.S.-based cloud company Fastly Inc, reports Reuters.
High-traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and The New York Times went down, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. They came back after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour early in the morning in the United States but middle of the day in Europe.
“Our global network is coming back online,” Fastly said.
The United Kingdom’s attorney general earlier tweeted that the country’s main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.
The disruption may have caused issues for citizens booking COVID-19 vaccinations or reporting test results, the Financial Times reported.
Websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, the Guardian and Bloomberg News also faced outages.
[The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age were also impacted for a time overnight.]
Ticker News rolling coverage: Major websites back up after Fastly outage restored
A major outage has impacted news websites and government web pages around the world, impacting CNN, BBC News, the Guardian and Australian titles including The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, reported Ticker News’ Ahron Young.
[Ticker News was the first news channel to provide rolling news coverage of the outage last night with anchors hosting from Melbourne and Singapore.]
Countless popular websites including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and Financial Times are currently facing an outage.
Some visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.”
Major websites restored after global CDN provider Fastly crashes
A number of high-profile websites including the BBC, the New York Times, Reddit, The Sydney Morning Herald and Twitch went offline on Tuesday evening during a mass web outage, reports 9News’ Stuart Marsh.
The outage was connected to a San Francisco-based website service provider named Fastly and lasted for about an hour.
The outage also impacted a number of Australian websites, including 9Now, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
The impact highlights the relative fragility of the internet’s architecture given its heavy reliance on big tech companies — such as Amazon’s AWS cloud services — as opposed to a more decentralised array of companies.
Business of Media
Ben Roberts-Smith was offered PwC partnership
Ben Roberts-Smith was offered a partnership at big four consulting firm PwC but withdrew from talks after the publication of stories that he claims defamed him and for which he wants millions in damages. reports AFR’s Max Mason and Edmund Tadros.
Bruce McClintock, SC, acting for Roberts-Smith, said he will seek aggravated damages for distress suffered due to the publication of a series of articles; regular damages for harm caused; as well as claims for economic loss and damage to earning capacity.
As part of Roberts-Smith’s claims, McClintock told the Federal Court on Tuesday that the former soldier was offered a job at a big four accounting firm in 2018.
The Australian Financial Review can reveal the firm was PwC, but they declined to comment.
ABC’s general counsel Connie Carnabuci is leaving the public broadcaster
The ABC’s most senior lawyer told management in November last year she would be leaving the public broadcaster but she has been unable to do so since defamation proceedings by Christian Porter began, reports News Corp’s Sophie Elsworth.
Connie Carnabuci – who has been in the role as general counsel since July 2017 – made a decision to depart the ABC seven months ago and her position was advertised shortly afterwards. But seven months on she still remains in the role.
“She agreed to stay on for reasons that would be obvious. She has made her intentions clear and there will be an appointment made in due course,” a senior insider said.
Television
ABC launches First Nations Talent Portal
ABC has launched a First Nations Talent Portal to bring together content creators and a pool of potential contributors reports TV Tonight.
The talent portal will help current and emerging First Nations voices and screen practitioners to be part of the Australian media and entertainment industries both on-air and behind-the-scenes.
ABC is now inviting media creatives, performers, academics, community spokespeople, peak body representatives, researchers and the like, to fill in their details if they would like to become a potential contributor to ABC content. Those opportunities include guest appearances, producing, reporting, backfill, acting and hosting.
Seven slapped over accuracy in Sunrise news item
Seven has breached broadcast accuracy rules for a report aired on Sunrise that claimed a motorbike rider ‘deliberately rode off a footpath and into a 13-year-old girl’, reports TV Tonight.
In September 2020 Sunrise reported on a collision about a NSW motorcycle accident in which it claimed a young motorbike rider “deliberately rode off a footpath and into a 13-year-old girl, knocking her to the ground.” The incident footage comprised dashcam footage.
A complaint to the Australian Communications and Media Authority questioned whether the word “deliberately” was fair given the rider had not been apprehended, and how it arrived at their intent.