The UK government website was one of many giving error messages on Tuesday morning in what appeared to be a global internet problem.
The websites of several major media companies – including the Guardian, Financial Times, Independent and New York Times – were also down.
Anyone trying to access the gov.uk site – got the message “Error 503 Service Unavailable”.
The Guardian tweeted: “The Guardian website and app are currently affected by a wider internet outage and will be back as soon as possible.”
Other websites affected include online discussion platform Reddit, the Evening Standard and French newspaper Le Monde.
Services monitoring website Down Detector has seen a spike in outage reports from Amazon’s cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services.
Tuesday at 11 a.m., the site recorded 1,700 reports.
Other websites affected include online discussion platform Reddit, the Evening Standard and French newspaper Le Monde.
The outage appears to have been triggered by a problem with a Content Delivery Network (CDN), a system used to host websites and their content on the Internet and deliver it to users.
Fastly, one of the world’s leading CDNs, reported a major outage on its global network, which is believed to be the cause of the outage.
The company offers services such as speeding up website load times, protecting against cyber denial of service attacks, and helping to deal with bursts of traffic to stay online and stable.
The American company has confirmed that it is “currently investigating the potential impact on the performance of our CDN services”.
