Major websites of banks, airlines, and big retailers went down Thursday in what appeared to be a brief but widespread outage.
The websites of Airbnb, AT&T, Costco and Delta showed error messages around midday Eastern time. They seemed to be operating normally, however, by 12:45 p.m. Other websites temporarily down included Expedia, American Express, and Home Depot.
Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, said users reported issues with 48 services, mostly within the United States.
Akamai, a major behind-the-scenes internet network company, said the disruption lasted about an hour. The disruption was caused by a bug in the domain name system (DNS) service, which allows web addresses to take users to their destinations, that was triggered during a software update, Akamai said.
It said there was no cyberattack.
“We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations,” Akamai said in a tweet.
The company said it was reviewing how it updates software to try to prevent outages in the future.
It marked the second major disruption linked to the cloud company in about a month.
Oracle Corp and Amazon.com’s AWS said the global issue related to Akamai’s network impacted access to many internet resources, including their own cloud services. Both Oracle and Amazon said their services were operating normally shortly after.
DNS is a service that lets users connect to websites on their phone or laptop, where a domain name is used to reach a cloud network to load content through an Internet Protocol (IP) address.
Previously in June, multiple outages hit social media, government and news websites across the globe, with some reports pointing to a glitch at U.S.-based cloud computing service providers.
