Internet down - as it happened: World’s biggest websites crash after Fastly outage, from Reddit to Amazon

... to The Independent’s live coverage of the ongoing outage.

This update from Kim Sengupta, our defence and security editor, who says the outage does not appear to be malicious:

Early indications, according to intelligence officials, were that the website crashes were not the result of malicious cyber attacks by hacking groups or hostile states. The sites affected appear to be sharing the same cloud content delivery network, a system of proxy servers and data centres, which had malfunctioned. The officials stressed investigations will continue for evidence of other possible reasons.

A number of the sites hit by the outage - including this one - are back online.

Reddit, Amazon, Twitch and various news publications appear to be working again, while Down Detector is seeing a massive drop in outage reports.

Without wishing to curse it, the internet’s woes may be over.

Martin Lewis, the founder of Money Saving Expert, has warned web users to be weary of “shyster sites” that may seek to exploit people following the internet outage.

“With Gov.uk website being down right now, be v careful if renewing passports, GHICs, applying for marriage tax allowance, driving licence etc.,” he tweeted.

“Top of search will be ads for shyster sites which look like the real thing yet charge unnecessarily.”

You can read the full story here:

We’re still not entirely sure who or what was behind the huge outage - whether it was a cyber attack or just technical issues - but we do know where the problem occurred: Fastly.

The Independent’s Adam Smith has more details:

Fastly, the content delivery network behind today’s internet outage, has issued an update to its status page.

The issue appears to be fixed after a bug fix was implemented at 11.36am UK time, but it warned that problems could continue.

“Customers may continue to experience decreased cache hit ratio and increased origin load as global services return,” the update states.

Full story here:

The company at the centre of the global internet outage was not exactly a household name before today.

The content delivery network (CDN) Fastly supported some of the world’s most popular sites, including Amazon and Reddit, with the importance of its role emphasized by the scale of the upset it caused.

Explaining exactly what it does, here’s The Independent’s technology editor, Andrew Griffin:

The Independent’s video team, together with our science and technology correspondent Adam Smith, have put this video together explaining what actually happened during Tuesday’s outage. You can watch it here: