Twitterati have field day as US websites crash

Dozens of major websites including Netflix, Uber and the BBC went down simultaneously in some areas of the US, but were soon up again in most cases.

The cause of the crashes remained unclear, but some appeared connected to trouble at a cloud service relied on by companies, although that did not stop the social media rumour and conspiracy mill from going into overdrive.

''We're aware that members are experiencing issues streaming on all devices,'' streaming television service Netflix said in a tweet at its customer service Twitter account. ''We're working to resolve the problem.''

Netflix spokesman Joris Evers told AFP that the outage was the result of ''technical issues'' at an UltraDNS cloud service provided by Neustar, and affected mostly US subscribers.

''UltraDNS is working to address the issue,'' Evers said. ''We apologise for the inconvenience.''

Neustar confirmed in a tweet that there was an issue with its UltraDNS.

Internet trouble tracker CurrentlyDown.com displayed a list of two dozen websites that were or had been out of service during the day.

The list also included Ameritrade - an online broker - and The Economist.

It was unclear whether all those affected relied on UltraDNS, but ride-sharing service Uber blamed its problems on that.

The outages sparked chatter at Twitter and other social networks.