Benzinga | Jul 22, 2021 01:48PM 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."

Update:Akamai issued a statement at 1:30 p.m. EDT that there was no evidence the disruption was the result of a cyberattack on its platform.

This story will be updated as more information emerges.