A massive internet outage temporarily took down the websites of the UK Government and numerous big name media companies.
The Guardian, Independent, New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg, Buzzfeed and the Financial Times websites all vanished from the web at around 11am today before gradually reappearing an hour later.
The Daily Record was unaffected.
Gov.uk - which is the main source of information for the public on UK Government services - also went down at the same time.
Affected websites displayed the message: "Error 503 Service Unavailable".
Other websites affected included the online discussion platform Reddit, the Evening Standard and French newspaper Le Monde.
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, 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”.
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."
Alex Hern, the Guardian's technology editor, tweeted: "Fastly, a cloud computing services provider, has been identified as the cause of the problem.
"The company runs an "edge cloud", which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic.
"That technology inherently requires Fastly to sit between most of its clients and their users, meaning that if the service suffers a catastrophic failure, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all."
