Multiple outages hit the internet on Tuesday, shutting down several media, government and social media websites across the world. Leading websites operated by news outlets such as the Financial Times and The New York Times, and e-commerce sites like Amazon were down but restored later. Other sites that were impacted included HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, and Vimeo. The outages lasted for a few minutes to an hour. Some reports suggested that there was a glitch at a US-based cloud computing services provider but more details were awaited.
???? UK government, New York Times, Guardian, FT, Spectator & CNN websites are all reportedly down simultaneously
— Alex Lewis (@A_WelshLegend) June 8, 2021
????#InternetShutdown pic.twitter.com/Do7pVaV6Gh
As an investigation was underway to find out what exactly happened, users on social media platforms that were not affected by the outages shared funny memes and began wondering “is this the end”.
Seriously? Is this End? #InternetShutdown pic.twitter.com/qhtFFbslDA
— Abhay Patil ???????? (@Abhay3838) June 8, 2021
Some users suggested they were back to playing Solitaire like the good, old days when the internet was a new and scarce commodity.
#internetoutage back to solitaire.#InternetShutdown pic.twitter.com/kRdfVcmvam
— Atish Parmar (@atish_parmar) June 8, 2021
Some others took a dig at those clamouring on social media about the shutdown using a perfectly fine internet connection.
People tweeting about #InternetShutdown from the perfectly fine internet right now like pic.twitter.com/u40LmjCSTV
— Meme xD (@Meme__xD) June 8, 2021
Me agreeing with everyone on the internet with #InternetShutdown even when my internet was working just fine. pic.twitter.com/RemvcMsrVA
— Sagarika Biswas (@SagaBiswas) June 8, 2021
People tweeting about #internetdown from their completely fine internet right now.#InternetShutdown pic.twitter.com/4srxSdfnlJ
— shubhi bhardwaj (@shubhiBhardwaj_) June 8, 2021
Me tweeting about #internetdown from my completely fine internet right now.#InternetShutdown pic.twitter.com/2A4ErI709y
— Mia???????? (@notyaregularhoe) June 8, 2021
How it feels to Tweet when the internet is down. #InternetShutdown #internetoutage #internetdown pic.twitter.com/pr9WwL7qof
— Uddalak Das (@ninja_writer21) June 8, 2021
There were also those who took the opportunity to make fun of social media influencers, who rely on Internet platforms to reach their audience.
#InternetShutdown
— aniel-ani ???????? #wearmask (@ani_royal007) June 8, 2021
Famous influencers..!! pic.twitter.com/qbmfTJatC4
#internetdown #InternetShutdown
— Debanshi Biswas (@BiswasDebanshi) June 8, 2021
Meanwhile youTubers streamers and socialmedia influencers be like :-- pic.twitter.com/tmrUTZ9M3t
Others just had some real fun when most users were struggling to come back online or do anything meaningful.
#InternetShutdown no worries let's go out pic.twitter.com/NpE3yIOE3y
— Last Human (@pLastHuman) June 8, 2021
Experiencing #InternetShutdown #internetdown pic.twitter.com/ICLl0xzLGe
— Inderjitsingh Sidhu (@Inderji42720445) June 8, 2021
It was me.
— ???????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????? ???????????? (@sandeepgiri28) June 8, 2021
I plugged the wrong pie warmer in.#InternetShutdown pic.twitter.com/LFwfplddpH
*updates LinkedIn profile to 'Skynet CTO'* #InternetShutdown pic.twitter.com/uBfJMFtxTI
— Apptain America (@ApptainAmerica) June 8, 2021
According to outage monitoring website Downdetector.com, nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon.
Most websites that went down showed a “503 error” code on their pages when a user tried to reach that website. The problem was caused by a glitch at American cloud service provider Fastly. It said on its service status website (which was working) it had identified the issue and fixed it.
Later, a Reuters report stated that several websites hit by the outage were coming back online.
The outages could have impacted those trying to book slots for COVID-19 vaccination to make reservations for immediate travel.
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