<span style="color: #222222;">A major outage affected a number of high profile websites including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch. The UK government website - <a href="http://gov.uk/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;">gov.uk</span></a> - was also down as were the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Times. Cloud computing provider Fastly, which underpins a lot of websites, said it was behind the problems.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">The firm said there were issues with its global content delivery network (CDN) and was implementing a fix.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">In a statement, Fastly said, they identified a service configuration that triggered disruption across their points of presence, POPs globally and have disabled that configuration.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">A POP allows content to be sent from globally distributed servers that are close to the end use. The issues began at around 11 am British Summer Time and lasted for an hour. Other affected websites included CNN and streaming sites Twitch and Hulu. The outage also broke some parts of other services, including Twitter's emojis.</span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;"> </span><br />'' <span style="color: #222222;">Websites were also beginning to be restored, after around an hour of downtime. It appears the problems were localised and specific locations across Europe and the US were affected. Other websites knocked offline included PayPal, Shopify, BBC.com, HBO Max and Vimeo. Similar problems have also affected Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare in the past, two other huge cloud computing firms.</span><br />''  <br />