Benzinga | Jul 22, 2021 01:08PM EDT

Massive Internet Outages Disrupts Cyberspace

A widespread internet disruption began to unfold on Thursday morning, crippling the websites of major consumer-facing companies in multiple industries.

What's Known: The Internet outage monitoring platform DownDetector is reporting a multitude of problems users of many popular sites.

Among the companies whose websites appear to have been impacted are Ally Bank (NYSE:ALLY), British Airways, Delta Airlines (NYSE:DAL), Fidelity Investments, Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), Sony's (NYSE:SONY) Playstation Network and United Parcel Service (NYSE:UPS).

What's Up In The Air: The cause of the disruption has not been confirmed as of this writing, and unconfirmed reports that the outage is part of a massive distributed denial of service (DDOS) assault have filtered on social media.

Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ:AKAM) reported an "emerging issue" with its Edge DNS service. At roughly 1 p.m. EDT, the company tweeted that it "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."

This story will be updated as more information emerges.