Websites Experience Outages After Fastly's Technical Issues

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Some popular websites are back up and running after the cloud company that services them crashed.

Fastly experiences what they called "service configuration" issues, which wiped some news and information sites off the web roughly an hour on Tuesday.

When users hopped on websites like CNN and Amazon, the message "Error 503" was on their screens. The company said it doesn't seem like a hack.

According to one expert who KDKA's Royce Jones spoke with, situations like this really could start happening more often because so many people are using the internet while so few are working to keep it running.

"We have an unlimited demand for limited resources in technology," said Tom Dugas, the chief information security officer for Duquesne University. "We are trying to pump in as much staffing into our communities as we can and try to get people to track it in computer science. But we're still short. It's one of the job markets that are in highest demand and we want to try and attract as many people as we can."

Companies like Fastly are so-called "content delivery networks," which are basically the delivery people of the internet.

Instead of the websites that we access using their servers to distribute the content, they use companies like Fastly to speed up the process.