Website outages hit Olympics, Amazon and major banks

Multiple major websites were down for about an hour Thursday afternoon in an apparent widespread outage linked to the global content distribution network Akamai.

Sites hit spanned many different fields, including the site for the upcoming Olympic Games.

However, the impacted websites appeared to be operating again around 1 p.m. Other websites involved in the outage included those for major banks; gaming sites such as Steam; airline websites such as Delta; online news publications such as the Dallas Morning News; and e-commerce giant Amazon.

Akamai confirmed Thursday afternoon that it was investigating an “emerging issue with the Edge DNS service.”

“We are actively investigating the issue. If you have questions or are experiencing impact due to this issue, please contact Akamai Technical Support. In the interest of time, we are providing you the most current information available, which is subject to changes, corrections, and updates,” the company said in an update on its website.

Roughly 15 minutes after Akamai acknowledged the service disruption, the company said it had implemented a fix for the issue and service was back to normal.

“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 tweeted.