WhatsApp, Reddit and Slack knocked offline because of CloudFlare problems

Reports suggest that transatlantic undersea cable was to blame

Web hosting firms CloudFlare and Amazon Web Services (AWS) were hit with issues across Europe that took services such as WhatsApp, Reddit and Slack offline.

CloudFlare admitted on its service status website on Monday that it had identified a fault with "an upstream transit provider".

The provider in question appears to be TeliaSonera, a telecoms provider in the Nordic and Baltic countries, and reports claim that a problem with one of the company's transatlantic cables is to blame for the downtime.

Angry users reported that the fault affected many of the world's most popular websites and services, and that Buffer, Medium, Reddit, Slack and WhatsApp all suffered glitches during the downtime. Users reported that they were either slow or inaccessible.

CloudFlare has since said that a fix has been implemented and it's "monitoring the results", so normality should resume soon.

In a possible link to CloudFlare's downtime, some users have said that they are having problems with AWS.

Amazon has admitted that an "external provider" caused some problems on Monday, but that the fault has since been put to bed.

"Between 5:10am and 6:01sm PDT an external provider outside our network experienced an issue which impacted internet connectivity between some customer networks and the EU-WEST-1 Region," AWS said.

"Connectivity to instances and services in the Region was not impacted by the event. The issue is resolved and the service is working normally."