In what is becoming an alarmingly common occurrence, some of the internet’s biggest websites, apps, and services have gone offline. At around 10:00 a.m. ET on Thursday, outages for dozens of popular services were reported on DownDetector. PlayStation Network,
Some of the affected websites and services are back online as of 12:45 p.m. ET, but many others are not. At the moment, I am unable to load PlayStation.com, Delta.com, FedEx.com, and Dominos.com. According to multiple reports, more than 29,000 websites are offline.
What caused Thursday’s internet outage?
We still don’t know the cause of the outage. We also can’t yet verify its source, but we do have at least one clue. At 12:09 p.m. ET, Akamai Technologies published the following status update:
Investigating – We are aware of 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.
Cloud service provider Oracle shared an update on its website as well shortly after Akamai updated its status page, reading: “We are monitoring a global issue related to a partner Edge DNS provider that is impacting access to many internet resources, including Oracle cloud properties. Resources within the Oracle cloud are continuing to run and are not impacted by this event.”
Some of the outages are already having serious impacts on consumers. Delta tells flyers struggling to load its app that they can “continue to check in for flights at this time at the airport.”
UPDATE: Several top websites began coming back online around 12:45 PM ET, suggesting the issue is in the process of being resolved.
Here’s just a glimpse of how ridiculously widespread the internet outage was on Thursday:
