SOCIAL media, news websites, and other major websites across the globe, experienced downtime after an outage at US-based cloud computing service provider Fastly. Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit, The Guardian, the Financial Times, and other popular websites, have all returned 503 errors. Fastly said it was investigating the potential impact to performance with their content delivery networks (CDN) services. Content delivery networks (CDNs) are an important part of the internet infrastructure. These companies run global networks of servers, to improve performance and availability of web services. These CDNs act as proxy servers and cache some data as close to the end user as possible. According to the website, most of Fastly's coverage areas were facing "degraded performance". According to the site, there was "degraded performance" in many parts in North America, South America, and Europe. On the local side, users in Cape Town and Johannesburg were also affected.