A number of websites around the world, including the United Kingdom government website, media outlets such as the New York Times, Financial Times, CNN, and Amazon, went down for almost an hour on Tuesday due to an issue with their content delivery network, or CDN, provider Fastly.

The US cloud computing company acknowledged there was a problem with its CDN just around 11am London time, and applied a fix, with the problem being resolved around one hour later.

"We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs (points of presence) globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online," the company wrote on Twitter.

Fastly was founded in 2011, providing services to large companies to help them deliver content to users quickly.

Industry experts say it is hard to calculate the cost of the outage.