A major internet outage has affected the websites of major retail, financial, logistics and travel websites, while 911 service in several Virginia cities appears to be affected by a cut fiber optic cable.
Down Detector, a service that detects whether websites are working properly or not, began reporting a series of at least 50 major website outages shortly before 12pm EST on Thursday.
The websites of UPS, Delta Air Lines, Costco, American Express and Home Depot were down, displaying domain name system (DNS) service errors.
Akamai Technologies, a backbone internet service provider, said in a statement that it had detected an issue with its 'edge DNS service' that appeared to be the source of the outage, which was resolved within an hour.
Among the potentially affected websites were Airbnb, US Bank, UPS, Fox News, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, AT&T, Groupon, Expedia, HBO Max and TikTok, according to Down Detector.
The filings page of the US Securities and Exchange Commission also displayed a message saying that it was 'temporarily unavailable'.
Costco's website was among those affected in what appeared to be a widespread internet outage on Thursday
Backbone service provider Akamai Technologies appeared to be the source of the outage. The company said that it had fixed the service disruption by 12.47pm
A number of global financial institutions also appeared to be impacted, including Interactive Brokers, Santander Bank, BBVA and BB&T.
Down Detector tweeted that Amazon Web Services and
