A global internet outage has seen the world's biggest websites crash almost instantly, Sky News reports.
Internet users were faced with unexpected error messages when visiting sites such as the UK Government website, Reddit, Twitch, Amazon, HBO Max, CNN, Etsy, and Paypal, according to tracking website Down Detector.
Many of the world’s biggest news outlets, including the New York Times, CNN, New Statesman, and Financial Times were also affected by the blunder.
While some sites are completely down, others have been reported to not working properly. Twitter users noted that the social media site loaded, but emojis and some images used in tweets did not load.
iNews reports that Facebook is among the websites that did not get affected by tech issues. Websites that were affected displayed error messages that said: "Error 503 Service Unavailable".
Fastly, one of the world’s major CDNs, reported a major outage across its global network, which is believed to have caused the outage.
On its "service status" page, Fastly said that the issue was with its CDN, or content delivery network.
That is a set of servers distributed across the world that serve up the content that make up websites, with the aim of ensuring that data is sent as quickly as possible.
This means a set of servers distributed globally serve up the content that make up websites, so any issues with CDNs instantly send websites offline.
The US firm has confirmed it is "currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services". Two further updates posted since only made clear that the company is "continuing to investigate this issue".
On its own status page, Reddit pinned the problems on "one of our service providers". It also said it was "currently investigating".
In a tweet, a UK Government spokesman said: "We are aware of the issues with Gov.uk which means that users may not be able to access the site.
"This is a wider issue affecting a number of other non-government sites. We are investigating this as a matter of urgency."
