Major websites taken down in widespread outage

Several major websites and online services went down Thursday in a brief but widespread outage. Websites including those of UPS, AT&T, Airbnb, USAA and more were offline, with some showing DNS-related error messages. Popular gaming services including PlayStation Network and Steam were also impacted, as was Fortnite maker Epic Games.

Several of the sites and services have now returned. Problems started at around 11:30 a.m. ET, according to reports on web monitoring site Down Detector.

The problem appears to have stemmed from an outage with the Edge DNS service provided by Akamai, a content delivery network and cloud service company. Just after noon ET, Akamai noted on its status page that it was investigating "an emerging issue" with the Edge DNS service.

Akamai later confirmed to CNET that a fix was in place and the service was resuming normal operations.

"We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations," said Akamai spokesperson Tim Whitman. "We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated."