Multiple popular websites were facing a global outage on June 8. The home pages of these websites showed an ‘Error 503’ message.

Websites of the United Kingdom government, Reddit, video live streaming Twitch and those of major news outlets such as The New York Times, BBC News, The Financial Times and The Guardian were not accessible.

According to a news report by TechCrunch, a glitch at content delivery network provider Fastly was thought to be the reason behind the global outage. Some of Fastly’s customers including Business Insider and Imgur were also affected.

“We are continuing to investigate this issue,” Fastly said on its status website, referring to the incident as a “Global CDN Disruption”.

However, there was no confirmation that this had caused the outage.

Data from Google Trends showed that internet searches for “503 error” started surging at 3.14 pm Indian Standard Time.

What is Error 503?

The ‘503 Service Unavailable’ message refers to an error response code indicating that the server is not ready to handle the request. Common causes are a server that is down for maintenance or that is overloaded.