Hundreds of websites worldwide are down this morning – with the UK government, Amazon, Spotify and Amazon all experiencing issues.
Millions of users across the globe have reported problems trying to access web pages, with Netflix, Twitch, Pinterest and UK chemist Boots also affected by the outage.
While the reason for the internet outage remains unclear, it is likely the issue is with Fastly – a content delivery network (CDN) company that helps users view digital content more quickly.
Fastly’s technology requires it to sit between its clients and their users, meaning that if the service suffers a failure, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all.
In an error message posted at 10:58 UK time, Fastly said: ‘We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.’
Users took to social media to vent their frustrations about the outage.
One called it an ‘internet apocalypse’, while another said ‘everything just shut out of nowhere’.
Another tweeted that the internet was ‘broken’.
The outage saw visitors to a vast array of sites receive error messages including ‘Error 503 Service Unavailable’ and ‘connection failure.’
Some sites including the UK government website are down entirely, while others such as Twitter have more specific errors, such as not showing emoji.
Amazon, Spotify, Reddit and Twitch are all down this morning, with users reporting problems trying to access the services (stock image)
The outage tracker site DownDetector has picked up a number of issues affecting websites including Reddit, Twitch, PayPal, Amazon and Etsy (pictured)
Social media users complained that the internet was ‘broken’ following the problems this morning
Users across the world have been taking to social media to share their frustrations about the outage
Among the reported websites affected are Twitch, Reddit and Amazon, as shown in the Tweet above
Many users encountered problems trying to access Amazon’s website this morning
