Major websites hit by global internet outage

Many major websites dropped offline this week during a widespread global service outage.

The likes of Airbnb, UPS, British Airways and the PlayStation Network were all affected, with visitors receiving DNS errors which means their requests couldn't reach the sites.

One DNS provider, Akamai, responded to the incident and revealed they were looking to tackle the "service disruption".

Later, they added: "We have 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."

According to internet outage monitoring platform DownDetector, there were thousands of issues reported by users across dozens of different platforms.

While some users in Asian countries continued to report problems, those in Europe and the US saw an improvement as websites began to appear again.

© BANG Media International