Several airlines, banks and technology websites were coming back online on Thursday afternoon after a brief outage, the third such widespread incident noted in just a span of two months, raising alarms across social media.
Websites of Delta Air Lines, Costco Wholesale Corp , American Express and Home Depot were down, displaying domain name system (DNS) service errors.
Some Canadian companies also said that their websites and services were fully operational again after they experienced technical difficulties or outages this afternoon.
Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Montreal and PC Financial all told customers on Twitter that their websites are back up after earlier informing people that they were aware of technical issues and working to resolve them.
Monitoring website Down Detector showed a sharp increase in reported technical difficulties on the three companies’ websites after 12 p.m. Eastern time, along with Bank of Nova Scotia and Air Canada.
Cloud services provider Akamai Technologies had given an alert on its “Edge DNS” service incident, noting a “partial outage” on its website.
“We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations,” it said later in a tweet.
Oracle Corp said it was monitoring the global issue related to a cloud-based DNS solution provider impacting access to many internet resources, including its own cloud services.
DNS is a service that translates readable domain names to machine readable IP addresses, connecting it to a server and delivering the requested page on the user’s phone or laptop.
In June, multiple outages hit social media, government and news websites across the globe, with some reports pointing to a glitch at U.S.-based cloud computing service providers.
About 3,500 users reported issues with Airbnb’s website, while nearly 1,500 Home Depot users reported problems, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.
— With files from The Canadian Press