Ammon News - A massive internet outage has taken down the websites of the UK Government and numerous big name media companies, daily record reported.

The Guardian, Independent, New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg, Buzzfeed and the Financial Times websites all vanished from the web at around 11am today.

Gov.uk - which is the main source of information for the public on UK Government services - also went down at the same time, according to daily record.

Affected websites displayed the message: "Error 503 Service Unavailable".

Early reports have suggested it could be related to Fastly, a cloud computing provider, which underpins a lot of major websites.

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

Other websites affected included the online discussion platform Reddit, the Evening Standard and French newspaper Le Monde.

Alex Hern, the Gaurdian's technology editor, tweeted: "Fastly, a cloud computing services provider, has been identified as the cause of the problem.

"The company runs an "edge cloud", which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic.

"That technology inherently requires Fastly to sit between most of its clients and their users, meaning that if the service suffers a catastrophic failure, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all."