A sweeping internet outage briefly took down several major websites on Thursday, including Google, Amazon, Fidelity, Costco, Delta Air Lines, British Airways, Capital One and Vanguard.
Many of the sites were loading slowly or showing “DNS failure” messages, but by 1 p.m. ET, most of the affected sites had restored service, according to DownDetector.
Akamai, a cloud computing company that operates a content delivery network service, which helps move data across the internet, said it was experiencing some problems that appeared to be responsible for the outages.
“We are aware of an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service,” the company said in a statement. “We are actively investigating the issue.”
DNS stands for Domain Name System, which connects domain names to the right IP addresses so that people can access popular websites.
The Edge DNS service from Akamai services various apps and websites and keeps them secure from certain cyberattacks called distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks.
The company said at 12:47 p.m. ET that it “implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations.”
“We are continuing to monitor the situation and can confirm this was not a result of a cyberattack on the Akamai platform,” the company said on Twitter.
In a statement, cloud service provider Oracle said it was “monitoring a global issue related to a partner Edge DNS provider,” though it did not name Akamai. Oracle said resources within its own cloud service were not impacted by the incident.
“Resources within the Oracle cloud are continuing to run and are not impacted by this event,” the company said.
“Customers may be unable to access their resources via the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console,” it added.
Other affected sites, according to DownDetector, included Airbnb, Charles Schwab, The Home Depot, FedEx, HBO Max and many others.
Even the Tokyo Olympics website and app were reported to be briefly down, just hours before the Opening Ceremony. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s document search site was also briefly down.
Last month, a seemingly similar episode played out when Fastly, another cloud computing company that operates a content delivery network service, experienced a temporary outage that brought down a slew of major websites.