Huge swaths of mainstream news sites, and other major online services, have all gone down within minutes of each other this morning.

The Guardian, BBB, New York Times, The Independent, CNN, Buzzfeed, the New Yorker and other outlets are all returning 503 errors. And major service sites such as Twitch, Amazon and PayPal are down too.

At the G7, Joe Biden had “urged” other members of the economic group to “take seriously” the role that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies play in cyber-attacks.

Whatever the root cause of this situation may be, it’s certainly true “cyber attacks” are suddenly in the zeitgeist, and crypto is in the crosshairs.

Certain questions arise…

• Will this outage be blamed on a cyber-attack?
• If so, who will be blamed?
• What will the proposed “solution” be?
• If it’s not a cyberattack, what will be blamed?
• Will new legislation be pushed through on the back of this?
• Does the CDN story make sense?
• Why were only major sites affected
• Is the internet too centralised if this can indeed happen by accident?
• Can that be turned into a narrative that needs a solution?
• Will bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) be in the firing line?

It is possible this really was just an accident, they do happen.

But it’s also possible it was setting the table for more internet problems down the line, or just designed to make people feel vulnerable, or people made money shorting Fastly stocks before they slumped…who knows. Only time will tell.

Source: Off-Guardian