Numerous websites were unavailable Tuesday after an apparent widespread outage at the cloud service company Fastly.

High traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network, and The New York Times were all listed as experiencing problems by outage tracking website Downdetector.com, but appeared to be coming back up after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.

The UK government website - gov.uk - was also down as were the Financial Times and the Guardian. 

Cloud computing provider Fastly, which underpins a lot of websites, said it was behind the problems.

Fastly, one of the world’s most widely used cloud based content delivery network providers, said “the issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return”.

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.