Dozens of websites were reported to be offline or slow to load on Thursday, according to the online platform Downdetector, creating headaches for consumers.
The outage affected a range of companies, including financial firms like American Express and Chase, retailers like Amazon and Home Depot and travel companies like Delta Air Lines and Expedia.
On its website, Delta said that it was working to resolve “a technology issue” that was affecting “many global websites.”
“You can continue to check in for flights at this time at the airport,” Delta’s statement said.
The outages were reported as Akamai, one of the largest cloud-computing providers, said it had experienced problems with its DNS service, one of the most fundamental technologies of the web. DNS routes requests for a specific URL to the server where that website actually lives, but it wasn’t immediately clear if the Akamai outage was the source of the issues elsewhere.
At least one website, Zomato, a food delivery company, blamed Akamai for the outage. “Our app is down, owing to a widespread internet outage (Akamai),” the company posted on Twitter.
But just before 1 p.m. Eastern time, Akamai said it had resolved the issue.
“We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations,” Akamai said on Twitter.
Several counties in Virginia, including Campbell and Grayson, reported their 911 systems were down as well. On its Facebook page, the Grayson County sheriffs office said the outage was because of a fiber cut, but that 911 could be reached from landlines.
