Internet users worldwide lost access to several major websites like Amazon, Reddit and Twitch on Tuesday evening as a cloud computing network that the websites rely on was hit by technical issues, the Straits Time reported.
Several major international news sites like CNN, The Financial Times, The Guardian and The New York Times were also affected, as was the British government website gov.uk.
Attempts to access these websites returned the error code 503, meaning “service unavailable”.
The affected sites are linked to a content delivery network called Fastly, which confirmed the outage on its website at 2:58pm Pakistan time on Tuesday and reported it was investigating impacts on the performance of its services.
According to Fastly’s status page, its network was facing issues that caused “degraded performance” across all of its 81 data centres in North America, South America, Europe, South Africa, India and Asia Pacific regions, including two data centres in Singapore.
At 3:44pm, Fastly reported it had identified the issue and was implementing a fix.