Countless websites and apps around the world went down for about an hour Tuesday after Fastly, a major content delivery network, reported a widespread failure, CNN reported today (08). Fastly supports news sites and apps like CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times and many others. It also provides content delivery for Twitch, Pinterest, HBO Max, Hulu, Reddit, Spotify (SPOT) and other services. The outage took down other major internet platforms and sites, including Amazon, Target, and the UK government website — Gov.uk. The problem was caused by an outage at Fastly (FSLY), a cloud service provider. The company said on its service status website (which was working) Tuesday morning it had identified the problem and fixed the issue. Service for sites and apps started to be restored around 7 a.m. ET, although Fastly said some customers may experience longer load times as a residual effect of the problem. The outage affected dozens of countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia, as well as South Africa. Fastly said it had identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across its servers. The company has disabled that configuration. Essentially, Fastly took down its own network with a bad software update — a rare but not unheard of goof that has temporarily brought down parts of even larger online platforms, including Google (GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN), in the past. "The problem with the internet is it's always there until it isn't," said David Vaskevitch, CEO of photo app Mylio and former Microsoft chief technical officer. "For a system with so many interconnected parts, it's not always reliable. Any one fragile part can bring it down."