Thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe have come back online after getting hit by a widespread hour-long outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly Inc.
Australian news sites including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review and The Guardian went offline at around 8pm on Tuesday, before returning about an hour later.
They came back after outages that ranged from a few minutes to around an hour.
"Our global network is coming back online," Fastly said.
One of the world's most widely-used cloud-based content delivery network providers, the company earlier reported a disruption from a "service configuration" and did not give further details.
"Incidents like this underline the fragility of the internet and its dependence on a patchwork of fragmented technology. Ironically, this also underlines its inherent strength and how quickly it can recover," Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight said.
"The fact that an outage like this can grab headlines around the world shows how rare it is."
Typical service configurations for a cloud service provider can include updating security rules to protect information or instructing a server to refresh the contents of a news site before serving it to a customer, said Andy Champagne, senior vice president at Akamai, a cloud service company.
A simple typo can be propagated to thousands of servers and cause disruptions, he said.
Most of Fastly's coverage areas were facing "Degraded Performance" earlier in the evening, the website showed.
Separately, Amazon.com's retail website also seemed to be down on Tuesday. 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.
Websites operated by international news outlets including the Financial Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, CNN, the BBC and Bloomberg News also faced outages.
