Major government and news websites are beginning to appear back online after a massive outage on Tuesday morning.
As well as major news websites including The Guardian and the New York Times, the UK Government website GOV.UK also went down for just over an hour.
Users attempting to access websites affected by the outage received the following error message: “Error 503 Service Unavailable”.
Reports suggested the outage stemmed from cloud computing provider Fastly. In a status update they confirmed the problem had been fixed and websites would slowly return.
Amazon, Reddit, Twitch and other UK Government websites, including HMRC, were also affected.
In an error message posted just before 11am, Fastly said: “We’re currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services.”
Fastly posted the following at around 12:00pm UK time: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”
Consumer expert Martin Lewis issued a warning to people about the potential for scams.
“With gov.uk website being down right now, be [very] careful if renewing passports, GHICs, applying for marriage tax allowance, driving licence etc.
“Top of search will be ads for shyster sites which look like the real thing yet charge unnecessarily.”