Massive Internet Outages Disrupts Cyberspace

A widespread internet disruption began to unfold on Thursday morning, crippling the websites of major consumer-facing companies in multiple industries.

What's Known: The Internet outage monitoring platform DownDetector is reporting a multitude of problems users of many popular sites.

Among the companies whose websites appear to have been impacted are Ally Bank ALLY, British Airways, Delta Airlines DAL, Fidelity Investments, Oracle ORCL, Sony’s SONY Playstation Network and United Parcel Service UPS. The outage also impacted 911 emergency lines and phone systems across the U.S.

The source of the disruption was traced back to the Content Delivery Network (CDN) Akamai Technologies AKAM reported an “emerging issue” with its Edge DNS service. Although Akamai only has a 9.6% share of the CDN market, it is responsible for a considerable number of influential sites.

At roughly 1 p.m. EDT, the company tweeted that it "implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations. We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated." Within an hour, it confirmed normal operations were resumed.

Akamai added there was no evidence the disruption was the result of a cyberattack on its platform.