[ad_1]
published photo, Getty Images
A number of major websites were down Thursday, due to a global outage.
Visitors who attempt to access some of these sites receive messages indicating that there are errors related to Internet domain names, or something called DNS.
The affected services included Airbnb, a US company that operates an online marketplace for housing, UPS Parcels and Supplies, HSBC, British Airways and the PlayStation Network used for online gaming.
Internet domain name service provider Akamai has reported a “growing problem” with its Edge DNS service.
The company tweeted that the issue had been resolved and “the service is resuming normal operations.”
The Internet outage monitoring platform DownDetector has reported thousands of issues from its users across dozens of platforms.
Earlier, the platform said the issue was a “partial outage,” and some users said they were able to access some of the affected services in different regions.
And when some sites started showing up for users in Europe and the United States again, others in Asian countries continued to report issues.
The term DNS is short for Domain Name System or Internet Domain Name System, which converts the addresses of websites that we can read like bbc.com to addresses that point to a computer server somewhere on the Internet.
Often times, interruptions mean that the web browser cannot find the content it is looking for.
Other affected services reported by DownDetector include:
- Banks such as: Barclays, Lloyds, Halifax, HSBC.
- Game services such as: Steam, Call of Duty, EA
- Broadcast services such as ITV.
This is the second widespread Internet blackout in two months.
In June, cloud computing provider Fastly suffered a service outage that resulted in the outage of a number of major websites around the world, including many international newspapers and government websites.
It was later found that changing settings by a customer inadvertently affected the entire infrastructure.
Source link
