Several major websites across the world, including the UK government's Gov.Uk website, crashed for some time on Tuesday due to an outage at global website hosting service Fastly.

The affected sites, which included media organisations Financial Times' and Guardian' among others, displayed a message saying "503 Service Unavailable".

San Francisco-based Fastly, a global online content delivery network (CDN), reported an outage across its network affecting the sites which use its platform.

The firm said there were issues with its global content delivery network (CDN) and was implementing a fix.

In a statement, Fastly said: "We identified a service configuration that triggered disruption across our POPs (points of presence) globally and have disabled that configuration.

"Our global network is coming back online."

Fastly runs what is known as an "edge cloud", which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, as well as protect them from denial-of-service attacks and help them when traffic is peaking.

According to the BBC, the outage related problems seem localised, affecting specific locations across Europe and the US.

Media websites like CNN and the New York Times were also hit.

Fastly supports news sites and apps like CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times and many others. It also provides content delivery for Twitch, Pinterest, HBO Max, Hulu, Reddit, Spotify and other services.

Similar problems have affected Amazon Web Services, another huge cloud computing firm, in the past.