Global internet outage hits major websites - including the UK government site

A number of major websites, including the UK government site, appear to have been hit by an outage at global website hosting service Fastly.

Those logging into to gov.uk, as well as a raft of others, were earlier faced with a message saying "503 Service Unavailable".

Other sites affected include news outlets The Guardian, Financial Times, Independent, New York Times, Evening Standard, Bloomberg and Le Monde as well as self-proclaimed front page of the internet Reddit, shopping site eBay and streaming platform Twitch.

Fastly, a global online content delivery network (CDN), had reported an outage across its network, affecting sites which use its platform.

The US-based company has confirmed it has found the issue and that its global network is coming back online, and by around 11.50am BST, a number of services appear to have been restored, but loading times are slow, with access seemingly intermittent.

There had been earlier reports of some other sites being down too, including PayPal, CNN and Spotify - all of which appear to up and running normally.

The outage appears to be affecting some services on the Sky News website and app, including our live blog and videos.

The outage comes as hundreds of thousands of 25-29 became eligible for their COVID-19 vaccines, and were

already experiencing trouble booking online

.

News site The Verge had responded by resorting to using a Google Doc to report on the outage, after being affected by the issue.