Major websites begin to come back following widespread outage

Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley reports the latest on the global internet shortage.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: We are seeing widespread internet outages hitting some major companies right now, like Amazon, Delta, and Airbnb. We've got our tech editor Dan Howley here with more details on what is going on. Hi, Dan.

DAN HOWLEY: How are you doing, Kristin? That's right. Near and dear to my heart, Steam and the Playstation network are down as well. But according to the company behind this, it's Akamai. They're basically saying that it's not a cyber attack and that it really is an issue with their DNS servers. And essentially what that does is allows you to type in a internet address and then send you to the right IP address that that's associated with.

So there's a few of these companies around the world. This is one of them. And it's managed to take down a number of high profile websites, PayPal being one of them, a slew of others as well, LastPass. So if you're trying to type in your password to a website, you probably weren't able to access it as a result. But they do say that they've managed to get a fix up and running. And so websites should be coming back online.

But this isn't the first time we've seen this kind of issue before, specifically with DNS issues. There was someone a few years back who ran a bot attack on another DNS service. And we saw wide swaths of the internet go down. And occasionally, we will see issues with major providers for the cloud also cause big issues for internet providers. So it really is something that we take for granted. But we do end up seeing these kinds of downs, or outages rather, take down massive amounts of the web. And then you have to think, where's the backup here?

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Yeah, exactly, but I have to say, Dan, actually kind of refreshing that it's not a hack, right?