Major internet outage has affected the websites of major retail, financial, logistics and travel websites, and appears to be affecting 911 services in several areas in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries.
Visitors attempting to reach some sites received DNS errors, meaning their requests could not reach the websites.
DNS – short for Domain Name System – turns the human-readable web addresses we use, such as bbc.com, into addresses that point to a computer server somewhere online.
Disruptions often mean that a web browser cannot find the content it is looking for.
Down Detector, an independent outage monitor website, began reporting a series of at least 50 major website outages shortly before 12 pm EST (5:00pm WAT) on Thursday.
Gamers, shoppers and workers across the world were left livid after they could not connect to at least 48 websites on Thursday evening.
Shoppers also vented on social media they were struggling to access Argos, McDonald’s, John Lewis and eBay.
Among the affected websites were Costco, Airbnb US Bank, UPS, Fox News, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, AT&T, Groupon, Expedia and TikTok, according to Down Detector.
Others are;
PlayStation Network, HSBC, Steam, Barclays, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Airbnb, TSB, Call of Duty, Warframe, Channel 4, Waitrose, Sky Bet, Xero, EA, ITV, British Airways, Tesco Bank, LastPass, Fifa, Argos, John Lewis, UPS, McDonalds, Premiere InnFortnite, Cloudfare, 123 Reg, Credit, Karma, Nvidia, Bank of Scotland, Now TV, Barclaycard, Amazon Web Services, Sainsbury’s Bank
Epic Games Store and Aldi.
The latest development comes over a month after countless websites and apps around the world experienced an outage on June 8 after Fastly, a major content delivery network, reported a widespread failure.
Similar incident happened in March when Down Detector announced that Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram were facing technical issues.
Late February, people across the UK were experiencing similar issues as the were unable to connect to the social media platforms owned by Facebook.
Read Also: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Down For Thousands Of Users Worldwide
The filings page of the US Secruities and Exchange Commission also displayed a message saying that it was ‘temporarily unavailable‘.
In addition to the aforementioned websites, a number of global financial institutions are being impacted, including Interactive Brokers, Santander Bank, BBVA and BB&T.
Down Detector tweeted that Amazon Web Services and Oracle Cloud are also having problems, but a look on Amazon Web Services‘ website shows its operations appear to be working normally now.
Other websites that are being impacted include Microsoft, Evernote, Go Daddy, Vanguard and a number of other tech or financial-centric domains.
Down Detector also listed nearly 50 sites that customers were having trouble with in London.
Major content delivery network Akamai, which provides domain name system services, says it is experiencing problems and appeared to shoulder the blame tonight.
However, about 30 minutes after the sites started going down, the firm released a statement owning up to at least some of the problems.
Akamai has now tweeted that the issue has been fixed and “the service is resuming normal operations“.
We have 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.
— Akamai Technologies (@Akamai) July 22, 2021
Previously it said the issue had been a “partial outage” – and some users reported being able to access some compromised services in different regions.
As some websites began to appear again for users in Europe and the US, others in Asian nations continued to report problems.
