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.
WARNING: With https://t.co/VZqFz6HC6z website being down right now, be v careful if renewing passports, GHICs, applying for marriage tax allowance, driving licence etc.
Top of search will be ads for shyster sites which look like the real thing yet charge unnecessarily.
— Martin Lewis (@MartinSLewis) June 8, 2021
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:
@bing is really bad for this, 4 ads before the real result and they're very hard to immediately identify as ads too.
It's definitely a situation where you want to use an ad blocker on your browser. If they serve up risky ads, they don't deserve your advertising revenue. pic.twitter.com/lD3Q5jlOaE
— The Boy In The Lightbox. (@LaserWave2) June 8, 2021
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.
