Q&A: What is Fastly and how did it cause today's global internet outage?

An error at a US cloud computing firm saw dozens of major websites crash earlier this morning

Sites including the Guardian, Financial Times, Independent and the New York Times, the online forum Reddit, Twitter, Amazon and the UK Government’s gov.uk site were affected by the issue. File Picture: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire

A little-known US internet infrastructure firm has been at the centre of a major global internet outage after an error in its network took some of the world’s biggest websites offline.

But what is Fastly, and how did this disruption happen?