UK government website down as media sites hit

 

A number of major websites have gone down around the world, including the UK government web pages in what has been described as a global internet outage.

 

On Tuesday, internet users who had earlier logged into the UK government’s website gov.uk, were faced with a message saying “503 Service Unavailable”.

 

Other sites affected include those of news outlets such as The Guardian, Financial Times, Independent, New York Times, Evening Standard, Bloomberg, and Le Monde as well as Reddit, eBay and Twitch.

 

Also impacted by the widespread incident is music listening service Spotify as well as Amazon, Ebay and Etsy.

 

According to reports, the outage was sparked by an issue with a content delivery network (CDN), a system used to host websites and their content on the internet.

 

Fastly, one of the world’s major CDNs, reported a major outage across its global network, which is believed to have caused the outage.

 

The US firm has, however, confirmed that it has found the issue and working to repair it.

It was also gathered that at around 11:50am BST, a number of services appeared to have been restored, but loading times became slow.

 

Reacting to the development, the official GOV.UK Twitter account said: “We are aware of the issues with http://GOV.UK which means that users may not be able to access the site.

 

“This is a wider issue affecting a number of other non-government sites. We are investigating this as a matter of urgency.”