The internet has gone down. Here's why.

The Independent’s science correspondent Adam Smith explains why many of the internet’s largest websites – including Amazon, Reddit, The New York Times and The Independent itself – experienced outages on Tuesday. Users could see a “service unavailable” message when trying to access these sites.

The problem can be traced back to the infrastructure underpinning the websites. Cloud computing company Fastly said the issue was with its content delivery network (CDN), servers that provide the content on websites.

“[We have] identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across the [points of presence] globally and have disabled that configuration,” a company spokesperson told The Independent.