High-traffic sites, including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times, were down, according to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com. They resurfaced after outages that ranged from a few minutes to about an hour.

Fastly, one of the world’s most widely used cloud-based content delivery network providers, said it reported a "service configuration” failure and offered no explanation.

"Customers may experience increased origin taxes as global services return,” the company said.

"Incidents like this underline the fragility of the Internet and its independence on a patchwork of fragmented technology. Ironically, this also underscores its inherent strength and how quickly it can recover,” said Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight.

"The fact that an outage like this can make headlines around the world shows how rare it is.”

Fastly, which went public in 2019 and has a market cap of over $5 billion, is much smaller than competitors like Amazon’s AWS. It helps websites move content through less congested routes, allowing them to reach consumers faster.

The United Kingdom’s Attorney General previously tweeted that the country’s main website gov.uk was down, emailing for questions.

The disruption may have caused problems for citizens booking COVID-19 vaccinations or reporting test results, the Financial Times reported.

Fastly’s website said most of its coverage areas suffered from "degraded performance.” On several websites, error messages pointed to Fastly problems.

Websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, The Guardian and Bloomberg News also experienced outages.

News publishers came up with inventive solutions to report on the outage when their websites failed to load.

Popular tech website The Verge used Google Docs to report news, while UK Technology Editor at the Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the issues.

At the start of the outage, nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported issues with Amazon, according to Downdetector.com.

Twitter users quickly jumped on the news and created the #InternetShutdown hashtag with KITKAT’s official handle and told its 441,500 followers "Guess it’s time to pause”.

"We were offline for a few minutes because the whole internet went down,” tweeted Jitse Groen, chief executive of food delivery group Just Eat Takeaway.com.

(REUTERS)