Amazon and gov.uk among dozens of websites affected by Fastly outage Business

Hundreds of websites were taken offline on Tuesday after a major internet blackout affected swathes of the web, including the main government site, the White House, Amazon services, social media and media outlets.

The outage, which lasted about an hour, left dozens of the world’s most popular websites and internet services showing error messages after an internet infrastructure provider went down, cutting off millions of users .

The gov.uk domain, Reddit, Pinterest, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Financial Times have all gone extinct, unable to respond to requests to access their sites.

Users of streaming services such as Hulu, HBO Max, and Twitch as well as PayPal and Amazon have also reported issues.

The problem appears to come from a company called Fastly, which operates an “edge cloud” service that speeds up access to websites and protects them from cyber attacks by dealing with sudden surges in traffic.