Amazon, Reddit and Twitch are also some of the major websites that are down.

The UK government website - gov.uk - was also down as were the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Times, reports BBC.

Affected websites displayed the message: "Error 503 Service Unavailable", the British website reported.

Cloud computing provider Fastly, which underpins a lot of major websites, is appearing to be the reason behind the trouble.

In a tweet, the firm said: "We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online."

The Guardian earlier tweeted: "The Guardian's website and app are currently being affected by a wider internet outage and will be back as soon as possible."