A major outage has affected a number of high profile websites including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch. The UK government website – gov.uk – was also down as were the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Times. Cloud computing provider Fastly, which underpins a lot of websites, said it was behind the problems. The firm said there were issues with its global content delivery network (CDN) and was implementing a fix. In a statement, it said: “We identified a service configuration that triggered disruption across our POPs (points of presence) globally and have disabled that configuration. A POP allows content to be sent from globally distributed servers that are close to the end use. Our global network is coming back online.” The issues began at around 11am BST and lasted for an hour. Other affected websites included CNN and streaming sites Twitch and Hulu. The outage also broke some parts of other services, including Twitter’s emojis. Websites were also beginning to be restored, after around an hour of downtime. Fastly runs what is known as an “edge cloud”, which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, as well as protect them from denial-of-service attacks and help them when traffic is peaking.(BBC)…[+]