Major parts of the internet were out of action for a short period on Tuesday morning, with the UK government’s web presence among the global websites offline.
Media outlets including the Guardian and the Financial Times returned an ‘Error 503’ message for a time between 1100 and 1200 BST, which means a server is temporarily unable to handle traffic, or is otherwise unavailable.
According to BBC News, popular global social websites including Reddit and Twitch were also down.
Content delivery network Fastly reported an outage across its network, which consists of a large number of geographically-spread servers used by websites to serve content quickly to users across the internet.
The company described it as a ‘global disruption’.
As of midday, access appeared to be restored, although there were still reports of slow loading times and intermittent errors.
At 1157 BST, Fastly said it had identified the issue and applied a fix, but warned of increased loads as services returned to normal.
