A number of leading websites are experiencing technical difficulties on Tuesday morning.
The online sites for British national newspapers The Guardian and the Independent are down, along with FT, New York Times, CNN, Le Monde, Atlantic, New Statesman.
American social news website Reddit is also down, as well as music streaming platform Spotify.
Shopping sites Etsy, Ebay, and Amazon are also experiencing problems.
The Guardian tweeted: "The Guardian's website and app are currently being affected by a wider internet outage and will be back as soon as possible."
When users head on to the Independent's website, they are met with an "Error 503 service unavailable" message.
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”.
Alex Hern, the Guardian’s technology editor, tweeted that Fastly “has been identified as the cause of the problem”.
“The outage, which began shortly before 11am UK time, saw visitors to a vast array of sites receive error messages including ‘Error 503 Service Unavailable’ and a terse ‘connection failure’,” he tweeted.
Thousands of complaints have been reported to Down Detector - which offers real-time status and outage information for all kinds of services that users consider vital to their everyday lives and work.
We will keep this story updated once we know more information.
