A huge web outage knocked out hundreds of sites including the White House, Reddit, and UK government

• A widespread outage hit sites including those of the White House, Shopify, and Reddit early Tuesday.
• The outage appeared to be linked to the content-delivery network Fastly.
• Fastly reported problems at about 6 a.m. ET. The issue appeared to be fixed roughly an hour later.

Websites from entities including the White House, Gov.uk, Spotify, and Reddit were down early Tuesday amid a widespread outage apparently linked to the popular content-delivery network Fastly.

The problem also affected e-commerce sites, with some Downdetector users reporting problems with Shopify and PayPal. Shopify said some merchants had been unable to access their stores. It added that there were problems accessing its checkout.

Twitch, eBay, Vimeo, and the website of Elon Musk's company SpaceX were all down, too.

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The outage appeared to be linked to Fastly, which said at about 6 a.m. ET that it was investigating problems with its services globally. Most major sites rely on a select group of content-delivery networks, or CDNs, which allow sites and content to load faster. Though they are not usually not visible to consumers, if one of them experiences a problem, large chunks of the internet can be affected.

At 6:53 a.m ET, Fastly said it had identified and fixed the issue. A spokesperson told Insider that its global network was returning online.

News websites were interrupted too, including Insider, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, IGN, Forbes, Vice, and The Verge.