white house
The White House site was impacted by the massive outage.
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
  • A widespread outage hit sites including The White House, Shopify, and Reddit early Tuesday.
  • The outage appeared to be linked to content delivery network Fastly, which reported problems at around 6 a.m. ET.
  • See more stories on Insider's business page.

Websites including the White House, Gov.uk, Spotify, and Reddit were down early Tuesday amid a widespread outage apparently linked to popular content delivery network Fastly.

The problem also affected e-commerce sites, with some Downdetector users reporting problems with Shopify and PayPal's services. Shopify said that some merchants had been unable to access their stores. It added that there were problems accessing its checkout.

Twitch, eBay, Vimeo, and Elon Musk's SpaceX were all down, too.

The outage appeared to be linked to Fastly, which said at around 6 a.m. ET that it was investigating problems with its services globally. Most major sites rely on a select group of content delivery networks, or CDNs, which allow sites and content to load faster. Though usually not visible to consumers, if one of them experiences an outage, large chunks of the internet can be affected.

At 6.53 a.m ET, Fastly said it had identified and fixed the issue.

News websites were hit by the outage too, including Insider, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The BBC, IGN, Forbes, Vice, and The Verge.

This is a developing story...

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