Another massive internet outage along the East Coast struck significant online platforms Thursday, causing many such high-traffic websites as Amazon, Airbnb, FedEx and Delta Air Lines to go dark.
According to the tracking website Down Detector, sites such as UPS, USAA, Home Depot, HBO Max and Costco were among those affected by the outage. Other sites such as British Airways, Go Daddy, Fidelity, Vanguard and AT&T were among those loading slowly.
The cause of the outage, the latest in a series of major global Internet outages this summer, is not immediately clear. Akamai Technologies, the global content delivery network based in Cambridge, Mass., said on its website that it was aware of an “emerging issue.”
“We are actively investigating the issue,” said Akamai, a tech firm that works with some of the world’s biggest companies and banks.
The company later said: “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.”
The company said it expects to provide an update on the service disruption at around 1 p.m.
Delta said on its website that the airline was experiencing “temporary technical issues.” DraftKings acknowledged at around noon that its site was down.
“We’re aware of sitewide DFS and SB issues resulting in the app and full site not loading,” the company’s customer service team tweeted. “We’re working to have everything resolved and back to normal ASAP.”
Southwest Airlines, which was among the sites reporting outages in June, said the company was working on fixing the issue.
“Our Tech Team has been made aware of the issues our Customers are encountering on Southwest.com and we’ll get it back up and running ASAP,” the company tweeted. “We appreciate your patience and understanding in the meantime!”
PlayStation Network games such as Fortnite and Call of Duty also were temporarily down. Other sites took to Twitter to assure customers that their services would be restored.
The disruption comes more than a month after two outages struck large swaths of the internet.
The June 8 outage, which affected sites like the New York Times, Amazon and Hulu, appeared related to the San Francisco cloud services provider Fastly, which many companies use to help their websites load faster.
Then, on June 17, multiple airlines, banking institutions and trading platforms went down. United Airlines and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia were among those reporting outages, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange also faced technical issues. Much like Thursday’s outage, the service disruption last month stemmed from a failure at Akamai. The company previously said that outage was due to a bug in a service used to mitigate distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Though outages at content delivery networks and Internet service providers generally get resolved rapidly, these disruptions - which have come amid pandemic-era shifts in people’s online habits - continue to underscore how these incidents can bring huge parts of internet life to a halt.