Large swaths of internet temporarily downed by outage at cloud company Fastly

Numerous websites were unavailable for more than an hour Tuesday after an apparent widespread outage at the cloud service company Fastly.

Dozens of high-traffic websites including the New York Times, CNN, BBC, Twitch and the UK government’s home page, temporarily could not be reached.

Messages such as “Error 503 Service Unavailable” and “connection failure” appeared on the websites of the Financial Times, The Guardian and France’s Le Monde newspaper.

Visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: “Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com.”

The White House website had an error message but, like other affected sites, was available again later.

San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 1000 GMT. It said in repeated updates on its website that it was “continuing to investigate the issue.”

Down Detector, which tracks internet outages, said: “Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service.”