Fame

Major websites back up after Fastly outage restored

Published

2 years ago

June 8, 2021

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

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 went offline Tuesday evening.

Some visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.”

#BREAKING | Web service provider confirms "global network is coming back online" after widespread outage of major websites. pic.twitter.com/mEeoI3vf0R
— ticker NEWS (@tickerNEWSco) June 8, 2021

Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message while visits to the New York Times and U.K. government’s gov.uk site returned an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message, along with the line “Varnish cache server,” which is a technology that Fastly is built on.

A glitch at Fastly, a popular CDN provider, is thought to be the reason, according to a product manager at Financial Times.

Fastly has confirmed it’s facing an outage on its status website.

“We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.”
fastly statement

#BREAKING Major news websites around the world are showing 503 errors.

From CNN to the NYT, the entire UK Govt, and in Australia the AFR, Age and SMH.

Apparently caused by US based company Fastly.

Ticker News is online and has live rolling coverage right now. pic.twitter.com/m1VKuRyAVn
— Ahron Young (@AhronYoung) June 8, 2021

#BREAKING "If you look at the scale and scope of this, that would be a jaw dropper….if it was some kind of hack."

Wall Street tech analyst @DivesTech on what could have caused the global internet outage. #tickerNEWS pic.twitter.com/mqMlKebOjd
— ticker NEWS (@tickerNEWSco) June 8, 2021

Some websites are slowly coming back up. “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” Fastly says on its status page.

Among those affected are Amazon, Twitch, Reddit, The Verge, The Guardian, ZDnet, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Pinterest, Kickstarter, Ebay, The Telegraph, CNN, and Imgur. Google searches are also partially impacted, as is the Google Cloud Platform. While Twitter is up, its emoji platform is offline.

https://twitter.com/tickerNEWSco/status/1402224477044240385?s=20

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a key part of the internet infrastructure. These companies run global networks of servers to improve performance and availability of web services.

CDNs act as proxy servers and cache some data as close to the end user as possible.

Fastly in particular is quite popular with media websites. The company went public in 2019. Fastly shares (NYSE:FSLY) are currently trading at $48.06, down 5.21% compared to yesterday’s closing price.

Fastly describes itself as an “edge cloud platform.” It provides vital behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web’s high profile sites, by helping them them to store, or “cache,” content in servers around the world so that it’s closer to users.

Rival, AWS lists no disruptions to its cloud or CloudFront service. Web infrastructure company CloudFlare is currently performing firewall maintenance, which it said could cause delays to GraphQL API Nodes for Firewall Analytics, firewallEventsAdaptive, firewallEventsAdaptiveGroups, and firewallEventsAdaptiveByTimeGroups. However, it is not believed to be the cause of the outage.

Me on my first day at #Fastly: What does this button do?

The internet: pic.twitter.com/IYYEbDEC0n
— Mark the Blogger (He/him) (@MarktheBlogger1) June 8, 2021

Fastly said: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.” A number of sites that were hit early appeared to be coming back online.

Business

Deepfakes are taking over Hollywood

Published

3 days ago

May 30, 2023

ticker NEWS

Deepfakes are the online phenomenon changing the way in which we consume and trust social media

Have you ever scrolled through social media and found a celebrity selling something a bit left of centre?

Chances are you have fallen victim to a deepfake.

These images and videos are a type of artificial intelligence, which promises to create doctored videos, which are almost impossible to tell apart from the real thing.

They have typically been used in pornographic clips and for celebrity endorsements.

Fame

Prince Harry involved in ‘near catastrophic’ car chase

Published

2 weeks ago

May 18, 2023

ticker NEWS, Brittany Coles

Harry has long spoken out about his anger over press intrusion, which he blames for his mother’s death

Prince Harry, his wife Meghan and her mother were involved in a “near catastrophic car chase” involving paparazzi photographers in New York.

The incident took place after they left the Ms. Foundation for Women, where Meghan was honoured for her work.

“This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD (New York Police Department) officers,” said Prince Harry’s spokesperson.

The chase involved paparazzi driving on the sidewalk, running red lights and driving while taking pictures.

“I thought that was a bit reckless and irresponsible,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said.

Harry has long spoken out about his anger over press intrusion, which he blames for his mother’s death.

Princess Diana was killed when her limousine crashed as it sped away from chasing paparazzi in Paris in 1997.

Harry and Meghan stepped down from their royal duties in 2020, partly over what they described as intense media harassment.

Harry is currently involved in numerous court cases in London where he has accused papers of using unlawful methods to target him and his family.

Fame

Tom Hanks open to continuing career with A.I. help

Published

2 weeks ago

May 17, 2023

ticker NEWS, Brittany Coles

Despite the crackdown on A.I., one famous actor has raised the prospect of his career continuing after his death by using the technology

‘Forrest Gump’ and ‘Cast Away’ actor Tom Hanks says new tech could be used to recreate his image to appear in movies “from now until kingdom come”.

Hanks was asked about the legal ramifications of A.I. on a recent podcast with Adam Buxton.

He says talks are being held in the film industry about how to protect actors from the effects of the technology.

Hanks told the host: “I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but performances can go on and on and on and on.”

The award-winning actor acknowledged that tech developments could lead to an AI-generated version of himself appearing in films he may not not normally choose.