A leading internet content delivery service has identified the source of an outage on its platform which may have caused a worldwide internet issue and taken dozens of major websites offline.

US firm Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN) which helps websites speed up loading times and present their content to users, has said a fix “is being implemented”.

Websites affected by the outage appear to be gradually coming back online, but loading times are slow.

Many of the world’s leading global news organisations websites were hit by a service outage this morning.

News organisations including The BBC, CNN, The New York Times and the Financial Times were affected. The British Government’s Gov.uk website was also affected. A number of commercial websites were also hit by the outage.

Other websites affected included the online discussion platform Reddit, the Evening Standard and French newspaper Le Monde.

Anyone attempting to access the dozens of affected websites during the outage was given the message “Error 503 Service Unavailable”.

Separately, Amazon.com Inc's retail website also seemed to be down. Amazon was not immediately available to comment.

Nearly 21,000 Reddit users reported issues with the social media platform, while more than 2,000 users reported problems with Amazon, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector.com.

Amazon's Twitch was also experiencing an outage, according to Downdetector's website.

An issue was discovered by Fastly with its content delivery network and the company said it was working to implement a fix to the issue.

US firm Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN) which helps websites speed up loading times and present their content to users, has confirmed it is looking into an issue which had a “potential impact to performance with our CDN services”.

Fastly said it was investigating "the potential impact to performance with our CDN services," according to its website.

Most of Fastly's coverage areas were facing "Degraded Performance", the website showed.

Many websites of the world’s leading global news organisations and websites were slowly coming back online on Tuesday after a simultaneous outage hit some of the world’s biggest companies.

Websites such as The Guardian, The BBC, CNN and The New York Times were back online others such as Reddit and Gov.uk were still offline at the time of writing.

More to follow..