Major internet outage briefly hits multiple sites including Reddit, Amazon, New York Times

Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were coming back online Tuesday after being hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to U.S.-based cloud company Fastly Inc.

High-traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify and the New York Times were all listed as experiencing problems by outage tracking website Downdetector.com, but appeared to be coming back up after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.

Fastly, one of the world's most widely used cloud-based content delivery network providers, said "the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return."

The company, which went public in 2019 and has a market capitalization of more than $5 billion US, is far smaller than peers like Amazon's AWS. It helps websites move content using less-congested routes, enabling them to reach consumers faster.

The United Kingdom's attorney general earlier tweeted that the country's main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.

Some visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: "Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com." Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message, while visits to the New York Times and U.K. government's gov.uk site returned an "Error 503 Service Unavailable" message, along with the line "Varnish cache server," which is a technology that Fastly is built on.

News sites use workarounds

Fastly's website said that most of its coverage areas had faced "Degraded Performance." Error messages on several of the websites pointed to Fastly problems.

News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the widespread outage while their websites failed to load up.

Popular tech website the Verge took to Google Docs to report news, while U.K. technology editor at the Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the problems.

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

Amazon's Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector's website.

Websites operated by news outlets including the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times and Bloomberg News also faced outages.