More than 20K websites go down Thursday after major DNS failure
A major internet outage affected about 24,000 websites late Thursday morning, including Atlanta-based UPS, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot and the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, among others.
The company that seemed to be at the center of the problem was Akamai Technologies, an internet infrastructure company that, around 12:30 p.m., said it was experiencing a “service disruption.”
About 20 minutes later, the company said it was implementing “a fix for this issue.”
The company later published an update on its status page that read, “This incident has been mitigated”.
Domain name systems, or DNS, match computers up with the websites it is looking for.
Down Detector, the tracking website, reported sharp drops in outages that were almost as quick and steep as the initial spikes.
According to Forexfactory.com, the failure was reported around 11 a.m. ET.
Other major websites that experienced issues and outages included McDonald’s, FedEx, PlayStation Network, Fidelity, Steam and Airbnb. The U.S. Securities and Exchange website and company filings page were also affected.
Shortly after noon Thursday, Delta said its website and app are “functioning normally after they were briefly impacted Thursday by a technical issue a vendor had that impacted websites globally.”
”There was no operational impact, and we apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” Delta added.
“We were one of multiple companies impacted by a third-party provider issue,” Home Depot spokeswoman Margaret Smith said. “HomeDepot.com and the mobile app were back up and running within the hour.”
About the Author
Tim Darnell is an Atlanta native and veteran of several local, national, and international news, business and sports publications.
