The websites of many American companies reported major outages on Thursday, according to the Downdetector portal, which monitors the status of various online services in real time. The list of affected companies includes Microsoft, Google, Amazon, McDonald's, FedEx, American Express, Delta Airlines, UPS, Steam, Airbnb, HBO Max, and many others.
Many users reported domain name system (DNS) errors, meaning their requests could not reach the said websites.
Cloud service provider Akamai Technologies has issued an alert about an "Edge DNS" service incident, noting that it is investigating a "partial outage".
"We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations", Akamai said later in a tweet.
Akamai users have reported thousands of outages over the past few hours, with many of them leaving comments about the issue on Downdetector. In the meantime, some users have seen this as a perfect opportunity to post memes about the disruption.
This is the third major Internet outage in two months - previously, airlines, banks, stock exchanges, and trading platforms experienced brief outages due to a bug in a service that helps mitigate distributed denial-of-service attacks, according to Akamai.
And prior that, in early June, dozens of major websites (including Target, The New York Times, and a UK government page) were inaccessible for almost an hour due to a widespread failure at the Internet service provider Fastly.