Many popular websites fell offline on Thursday in a widespread global outage of service.

Visitors attempting to reach some sites received DNS errors, meaning their requests could not reach the websites.

Affected services included Airbnb, UPS, HSBC bank, British Airways and the PlayStation network used for online games.

One popular DNS provider, Akamai, reported “an emerging issue” with its Edge DNS service.

It has now tweeted that the issue has been fixed and “the service is resuming normal operations”.

Internet outage monitoring platform DownDetector had reported thousands of problems from its users across dozens o platforms.