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UK Government, Other Major Websites Begin To Work Again After Breakage

The UK government website - gov.uk - was also down as were the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Times.

A major outage has affected a number of high profile websites including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch, BBC reports.

The UK government website - gov.uk - was also down as were the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Times.

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The UK government had on its official Twitter handle 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.

“Following the outage earlier, most information and services on GOV.UK are now back online. We are working to resolve any remaining issues and continue to monitor the situation.”

A later tweet read, “GOV.UK is now working as normal. All information and services on GOV.UK are now back online.”

Cloud computing provider Fastly, which underpins a lot of websites, said it was behind the problems.

The firm said there were issues with its global content delivery network (CDN) and was implementing a fix.

In a statement, it said: "We identified a service configuration that triggered disruption across our POPs (points of presence) globally and have disabled that configuration.

A POP allows content to be sent from globally distributed servers that are close to the end user.

"Our global network is coming back online.

The issues began at around 11am BST and lasted for an hour. Other affected websites included CNN and streaming sites Twitch and Hulu. The outage also broke some parts of other services, including Twitter's emojis.

Websites were also beginning to be restored, after around an hour of downtime.

Fastly runs what is known as an "edge cloud", which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, as well as protect them from denial-of-service attacks and help them when traffic is peaking.