A Major Internet Outage Appears To Have Knocked Down Amazon And Dozens Of Other Sites

The Amazon website is seen on December 5, 2017 in Dandenong, Australia. Amazon was among dozens of sites hit by a massive internet outage on Thursday.

By Deepa Shivaram

July 22, 2021

Updated July 03, 2023

A widespread internet outage caused several major websites to shut down Thursday afternoon, including Amazon, Delta, Capital One and Costco.

It's still unclear what caused the outage, but Akamai, a content distribution network that helps with the spread of data around the internet, posted online there was an "emerging issue" with their Edge DNS service. A DNS, or domain name service, helps match a website's name to its IP address. If the DNS fails, it becomes impossible to search and connect to a website by name.

By approximately 1:13pm ET, the site read "all systems operational."

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

Akamai also confirmed that the outage was not due to a cyber attack.