Website outage impacts Amazon AWS, British Airways among others

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Websites of several airlines, banks and technology companies, including Amazon's AWS, British Airways, Delta Air Lines and American Express, faced outages on Thursday.

Reports by users showed 4,000 issues on Airbnb's website, while about 1,800 Home Depot users reported problems, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.

Websites were not loading and displayed domain name system (DNS) service errors.

DNS or Domain Name System is a service that translates readable domain names to machine-readable IP addresses, connecting them to a server and delivering the requested page on the user's phone or laptop.

The disruption lasted up to an hour and was caused by a bug in the domain name system (DNS) service, that was triggered during a software update, according to cloud company Akamai.

"We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations," Akamai said in a tweet.

Services resumed after rolling back the update, Akamai added, and confirmed the disruption was not due to a cyberattack.

"We are reviewing our software update process to prevent future disruptions."

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.

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