Some of the biggest websites across the UK were taken down in a massive internet outage on Tuesday.
The Guardian, Independent, New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg, Buzzfeed and the Financial Times were among media giants hit at around 11am.
Users of Gov.uk - the main source of information for the public on UK Government services - were also left scratching their heads as the site vanished.
The Daily Record reports how the 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, 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: "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."
