The outages coincided with reports of system disruptions from Akamai and Oracle - two key providers of internet infrastructure services.
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It is unclear whether the Akamai and Oracle issues are related to the website disruptions, however.
Oracle said Thursday afternoon that its outage was the result of Akamai's service disruption.
"We are monitoring a global issue related to a partner Edge DNS that is impacting access to many internet resources, including Oracle cloud properties," Oracle said.
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Akamai's Edge DNS service helps route web browsers to their correct destinations and also provides a security service.
At approximately 12:50pm ET, Akamai said: "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."
Among the affected websites were Fidelity, the Securities and Exchange Commission's document search site, Airbnb, British Airways and others. Most of the sites were back up and running within less than an hour of when the outage began.