Internet users, unable to access their favorite sites, then flocked to Twitter, which remained largely unaffected by the crash, to share jokes and memes about the outage.
James Felton said: “Regular internet users heading to Twitter while half the internet is down,” and attached a reaction video of a woman looking baffled in a crowd.
Jack Sommers said: “The whole internet going down except Twitter is like cockroaches being the sole survivors of a nuclear explosion”
Aaron Gillies, under the alias TechnicallyRon, said: “With the internet down people flock to Twitter for their news, which is the equivalent of looking in the fridge for food and not finding any so having to search the [trash] instead.”
Major websites crashed for nearly an hour this morning, with outage reports coming out of the U.S., Australia, the U.K., and China.
Downdetector received reports of outages affecting websites including Spotify, Facebook, YouTube, eBay, Gmail, and more. News websites including BBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The Guardian also experienced outages.
Google Trends shows that search queries for Error 503 spiked sharply as the websites crashed.
Error 503 means that a service is temporarily unable to handle a request. This could be because the server is overloaded or is down for maintenance, for example.
The outage happened around 6 a.m. ET, but by 6:57 a.m. ET, Fastly said: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”
Fastly’s website says its network has “built-in redundancies and automatic failover routing to ensure optimal performance and uptime.”
Many websites that were experiencing outages earlier in the day now appear to be functioning as normal, at the time of writing.
