If you have a hard time browsing some of your favorite websites today, you are not the only one. Several websites like Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets like CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC, and Financial Times are currently facing an outage, and all of these website issues point to a glitch at Fastly.

Fastly is a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and CDNs are crucial to the internet. They run networks of servers across the globe to improve the performance and availability of web services. Chief among these include pushing data quickly around the internet to aid in services like online shopping and content consumption.

Techcrunch also explains that CDNs also act as proxy servers and do cache data as close to the end-user as possible. Beyond these functions, CDNS also have other features like load balancing, DDoS protection, web application firewalls, and numerous security features. Aside from Fastly, other known CDNs include Cloudflare, Cloudfront on Amazon Web Services, and Akamai.

As of this writing, Fastly acknowledges that there is an issue on their end and that they are addressing it.