Several major websites briefly went down on Thursday in a widespread outage linked to content distribution network Akamai. By about 12:50 p.m. Eastern Time, Akamai said it fixed the issue and the service seemed to be back to normal.
Akamai, a content distribution network, or CDN, which helps data move around the internet, said on its website it’s investigating “an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service.” The company said it expects to provide an update on its service disruption around 1 p.m. Eastern Time.
Oracle, a cloud service provider, said Thursday afternoon it is “monitoring a global issue related to Akamai edge DNS that is impacting access to many internet resources, including Oracle cloud properties.”
Oracle said resources within its cloud service are not impacted by the incident.
The Domain Name System is like a phone book for websites. The technology figures out the right IP addresses to use when people try to go to individual websites. The Edge DNS service from Akamai takes care of this work for apps and websites and protects against distributed denial-of service, or DDoS, attacks.
Delta Air Lines, British Airways, Capital One, Go Daddy, Vanguard, UPS, LastPass, AT&T and Costco were among the websites loading slowly or showing “DNS failure.”
Some of the outages appear localized, meaning some users may be able to access the sites while others cannot.
The Delta outage means customers can’t check in for flights or look up fares online, but the company said customers can check in with a Delta agent at the airport.
“We’re experiencing temporary technical issues serving our customers on delta.com and the Fly Delta mobile app,” said a message on Delta’s website. “We apologize for the delay, and are working to restore the site as quickly as possible.”
As of about 12:48 p.m. Eastern Time, Delta said its services were back up and running.
“Delta.com and the Fly Delta app are functioning normally after they were briefly impacted Thursday by a technical issue a vendor was having that impacted websites globally,” the company said. “We apologize for the inconvenience to our customers.”
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
-CNBC’s Leslie Josephs and Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
