British Government, White House, global media firms hit by website outages

The websites of the White House, the British government and international media firms were hit by outages on Tuesday.

Among those affected were CNN, the Financial Times, The Guardian and France's Le Monde newspaper.

The White House website had an error message but was available again later. The gov.uk websites remained unavailable at around 10:30 am GMT.

The BBC and the New York Times were temporarily inaccessible, but also later returned.

Social media sites like Reddit and video streaming service Twitch reportedly could also not be reached.

At least some of these outages occurred due to an apparent widespread outage at the cloud service company Fastly, The Associated Press said.

San Francisco-based Fastly acknowledged a problem just before 10:00 am GMT. It said in repeated updates on its website that it was “continuing to investigate the issue."

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 U.K. 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.

Downdetector, which tracks internet outages, said: “Reports indicate there may be a widespread outage at Fastly, which may be impacting your service.”