Large-scale outages hit social media, government and news websites worldwide on Tuesday, with some reports attributing the collapse to a technical problem at US-based cloud computing services provider Fastly.

Fastly has said it is investigating an issue with its CDN (Content Delivery Network) servers. "We're currently investigating potential impact to performance with our CDN services," says a notice on its websites. However, it did not provide any details on the cause of the disruption.

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

Major global news websites, including the New York Times,  Financial Times, the Guardian as well as the main internet portal of the British government were hit by the outage.

The gov.uk website reported a '503 Service Unavailable' error message around 6:20 am Eastern time, alongside similar connection failures from sites such as The New York Times, CNN, the London Guardian, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times.

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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 a disruption, according to Downdetector's website.