Hundreds Of Social Media, News, Government Websites Affected By Worldwide Outage

MIAMI (CBSMiami) - Hundreds of social media, news, and government websites experienced a worldwide outage early Tuesday morning.

Early risers looking for information on major news websites were greeted with the same error message.

"We discovered what's called an error 503. That's when domain traffic can't result to the host," said CBS News tech reporter Dan Patterson.

The outages also affected Amazon's main retail website and some government sites. Experts are linking the problem to an internet delivery provider called Fastly. They don't believe hackers triggered the outage.

"If this was a major hack, we might see a diverse number of errors instead of this one clue. We're looking at a misconfiguration that slowly resolved itself," Patterson said.

Fastly said the issue was identified and a fix applied.

Tuesday's outages follow a rise in cyber-attacks on several international companies, including the world's largest meat processor, JBS, and a company that runs a major U.S oil pipeline, Colonial Pipeline.

Experts said Tuesday's trouble is concerning because it highlights just how many major websites rely on big tech to distribute content and just how vulnerable that connection can be.