Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe are coming back online after being hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly.
High traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, Paypal, Spotify, Al Jazeera and the New York Times were out of commission.
They came back up after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.
Fastly, one of the world's most widely-used cloud-based content delivery network providers, said it reported a disruption from a "service configuration" and did not explain.
"Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return," the company said.
"Incidents like this underline the fragility of the internet and its independence on a patchwork of fragmented technology," said Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight
"Ironically, this also underlines its inherent strength and how quickly it can recover.
"The fact that an outage like this can grab headlines around the world shows how rare it is."
Fastly, which went public in 2019 and has a market capitalisation of more than $5 billion, is far smaller than peers like Amazon's AWS.
It helps websites move content using less-congested routes, enabling them to reach consumers faster.
The UK's attorney general earlier tweeted that the country's main gov.uk website was down, providing an email for queries.
The disruption may have caused issues for citizens booking Covid-19 vaccinations or reporting test results, the Financial Times reported.
Fastly's website said that most of its coverage areas had faced "Degraded Performance". Error messages on several of the websites pointed to Fastly problems.
Websites operated by news outlets including the Irish Times, the Financial Times, the Guardian and Bloomberg News also faced outages.
News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the outage when their websites failed to load up.
Popular tech website the Verge used Google Docs to report news, while UK Technology Editor at the Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the problems.
At the onset of the outage, nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to Downdetector.com.
Twitter users quickly jumped on the news, creating the #InternetShutdown hashtag with KITKAT's official handle telling its 441,500 followers "Guess it's time to Have A Break".
"We were offline for a few minutes because the whole internet broke down," tweeted Jitse Groen, chief executive of food delivery group Just Eat Takeaway.com.
