Servers Down All Over! UK Government, Amazon, CNN, Newspaper Websites Impacted

Several of the world’s most trafficked websites were inaccessible or running unreliably Tuesday morning, with many impacted sites showing 503 errors.

The outage of the websites, which included the UK Government’s own website, a host of newspapers and newsgroups, and online culture sites began a little before 1100 BST (0600 EST) and saw many sites return a 503 Service Unavailable message. Mozilla Web Developer documentation defines a 503 error as indicating “the server is not ready to handle the request. Common causes are a server that is down for maintenance or that is overloaded.”

We are aware of the issues with https://t.co/uLPSBt4jdQ which means that users may not be able to access the site. This is a wider issue affecting a number of other non-government sites. We are investigating this as a matter of urgency.

— GOV.UK (@GOVUK) June 8, 2021