Global media websites, including NYT, FT, CNN face outage

Preliminary reports suggest a technical glitch in a private CDN (Content Delivery Network) causing outage

Multiple outages hit social media, government and news websites across the globe including New York Times, Financial Times, and CNN on Tuesday, with some reports pointing to a glitch at US-based cloud computing services provider Fastly.

Dozens of high-traffic websites including the New York Times, CNN, Twitch and the UK government's home page were down. Agencies could not immediately confirm the issue affecting the sites.

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." 

Most of Fastly's coverage areas were facing "Degraded Performance", the website showed. 

Visitors trying to access CNN.com got a message that said: "Fastly error: unknown domain: cnn.com." Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message while visits to the New York Times and UK government's gov.uk site returned an "Error 503 Service Unavailable" message, along with the line Varnish cache server," which is a technology that Fastly is built on.

Fastly describes itself as an edge cloud platform." It provides vital but obscure behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web's high profile sites, by helping them to store, or cache, content in servers around the world, allowing users to fetch it more quickly and smoothly instead of having to access the site's original server.

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

Separately, Amazon.com Inc's (AMZN.O) retail website also seemed to be down.

Nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector.com.

Amazon's Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector's website.

Websites operated by news outlets including the the Guardian, and Bloomberg News also faced outages.