The U.K. Government’s website was also hit, while Hulu, PayPal and Twitter also reported issues.
Many of these websites appeared to be back online now at the time of reporting.
The crash followed a widespread outage at the cloud service company Fastly, which is used by scores of companies to improve their websites’ speed and reliability.
The Associated Press reported that San Francisco-based company acknowledged a problem just before 10:00 GMT, followed by repeated updates on its website noting it is “continuing to investigate the issue.”
About an hour later, Fastly said: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”
In a tweet Tuesday, the Guardian wrote: “The Guardian’s website and app are currently being affected by a wider internet outage and will be back as soon as possible.”
Fellow news outlets the Financial Times and Bloomberg News were also impacted by the outage, Reuters reports.
Etsy, which has since come back online, had earlier tweeted: We are experiencing some issues with the site."
Downdetector, an online service that collects reports of crashed websites, reported a sudden spike in crashed website reports across dozens of URLs.
According to data from Google Trends, search queries for Error 503 spiked sharply at around 6 a.m. EDT.
Error 503 indicates that a service is temporarily unable to handle a request, perhaps because the server is overloaded or down for maintenance.
