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08th Jun 2021

Martin Lewis issues urgent warning to Brits amid global internet outage

Kieran Galpin

The Money Saving Expert tweeted a cautionary tale for us all to heed

Today the internet broke, not because of a Paper magazine cover, and certainly not because someone posted a scantily clad Instagram picture. Martin Lewis, the founder of Money Saving Expert, has tweeted a cautionary tale to those attempting to use the government website.

Besides the government site, Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, and Twitter are among the companies hit with the sudden collapse of their service. News outlets like the BBC, The Independent, and The New York Times are just a few of the internets casualties. But don’t fear, because JOE.co.uk stayed very much operational.

It is believed that the American cloud computing service Fastly is responsible for the collapse. A statement on their website reads:

“Fastly’s network has built-in redundancies and automatic failover routing to ensure optimal performance and uptime.”

“But when a network issue does arise, we think our customers deserve clear, transparent communication so they can maintain trust in our service and our team.

“Notices will be posted here when we re-route traffic, upgrade hardware, or in the extremely rare case, our network isn’t serving traffic.

The Money Saving Expert asks users to be cautious of fraudulent sites that will scam you out of your money.

An update from Fastly reads as follows:

“The issue has been identified, and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”

Another Twitter user also had this to add in the replies to Lewis’ post:

Though the issue is apparently fixed, users should still be cautious while looking to use the government website. Advertisements will often appear before the genuine site, so be sure to check the validity of the website before entering your details.