Websites across the internet were temporarily unavailable on Tuesday, including the New York Times, Bloomberg News, Reddit Inc., and the U.K. government, after services from content-delivery network Fastly Inc. went down.

Fastly, which helps push data quickly around the internet, said that it had fixed the issue that caused a global outage of its services just before noon London time, about an hour after it first disclosed the problem. The websites that had been down earlier in the day appeared to be restored.

The fault shows the reliance that the most popular pages on the internet have on a few big technology firms to help them distribute content and host users. Fastly’s technology is one of a handful that act as a high-level website and application hosting service that large enterprises use to serve content to millions of users simultaneously. Downdetector, a website that tracks service outages across the internet, reported spikes in user-reported issues with websites from Amazon and Spotify to Twitch, Shopify and Etsy on Tuesday.

Rather than hosting all website content on a single set of servers in one location, Fastly puts cloud infrastructure in dozens of locations to let people download from a server closest to them.

Fastly’s shares dipped about 2.5 per cent in trading before markets opened in New York. The San Francisco-based company’s shares surged more than 300 per cent in 2020 after traffic increased during the COVID-19 lockdowns with more people working from home, though the stock has fallen so far this year.

A representative for Fastly didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.