Multiple websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, the New York Times and Bloomberg News were down across the globe earlier this morning.
The BBC, Guardian and UK government websites were also reported to have gone down.
When attempting to access the websites, an 'Error 503 Service Unavailable' message was instead appearing.
The Guardian's website and app are currently being affected by a wider internet outage and will be back as soon as possible
— The Guardian (@guardian) June 8, 2021
Other websites affected included the online discussion platform Reddit, the Evening Standard in the UK and French newspaper Le Monde.
The Irish Times website was also temporarily down for a short time this morning, but it is not yet known if it was related to the same issue as the other websites.
Separately, Amazon.com Inc's retail website also seemed to face an outage, however the company was not immediately available to comment.
Service monitoring website Down Detector registered a spike in reports of outages of Amazon’s cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services.
As of 11am on Tuesday, the site recorded 1,700 reports.
Content delivery network
PA reports the outage appears to have been sparked by an issue with a content delivery network (CDN), a system used to host websites and their content on the internet and serve it to users.
Fastly, one of the world’s major CDNs, has reported a major outage across its global network, which is believed to have caused the outage.
The company offers services such as speeding up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service cyberattacks and helping them deal with bursts of traffic in order to stay online and stable.
The US-firm has confirmed it is “currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services”.
Websites affected by the outage appear to be gradually coming back online, but loading times are slow.
Fastly has since updated its service status page, saying: “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”
