Martin Lewis has sent an urgent warning to Brits as government websites experience issues amid a global internet outage.
Huge sites including Amazon, Twitter Reddit and Gov.uk seem to be suffering from a reported global internet outage.
BBC news, the New York Times and The Guardian also seem to be affected by the connection issues.
Other sites like HMRC and Spotify desktop have also received reports of issues from users via Downdetector.
It is believed the reason for so many websites experiencing problems is an issue with fastly, an American cloud computing services provider, which is responsible for a number of sites across the world.
A message on their website reads: “Fastly’s network has built-in redundancies and automatic failover routing to ensure optimal performance and uptime.
“But when a network issue does arise, we think our customers deserve clear, transparent communication so they can maintain trust in our service and our team.
“Notices will be posted here when we re-route traffic, upgrade hardware, or in the extremely rare case our network isn’t serving traffic.
Now, the Money Saving Expert founder has sent a warning to Brits applying for passports, driving licences and the like as fraudulent sites could dupe ususpecting victims out of cash.
Taking to Twitter, Mr Lewis said: “WARNING: With http://gov.uk website being down right now, be v careful if renewing passports, GHICs, applying for marriage tax allowance, driving licence etc.
“Top of search will be ads for shyster sites which look like the real thing yet charge unnecessarily. “
WARNING: With https://t.co/VZqFz6HC6z website being down right now, be v careful if renewing passports, GHICs, applying for marriage tax allowance, driving licence etc.
— Martin Lewis (@MartinSLewis) June 8, 2021
Top of search will be ads for shyster sites which look like the real thing yet charge unnecessarily.
Once social media user replied: “I renewed my driving licence yesterday, had to scroll past several dodgy sites charging massive fees to get to gov site where it's £14.”
The internet issues currently seem to be localised so are only affecting specific locations across Europe and the US.
An update from fastly at 10:57 UTC said: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.”
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