Several high-profile websites including HSBC, Airbnb and British Airways hit by outages

skynews

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The websites of several high-profile companies including HSBC, Airbnb and British Airways were hit by outages on Thursday.

A message on the BA website read: "Service Unavailable - DNS failure. The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later."

And a message on Airbnb's site said: "This site can't be reached."

HSBC's website had a similar message.

Some of the sites were accessible about half an hour after the issues were first reported, just after 5pm in the UK.

And there are reports other airlines and major companies are also affected, as well as the 911 service on the east coast of the US.

It is not known exactly what caused the issues, however, Akamai Technologies reported problems with its Edge DNS Service.

It later confirmed a fix for its services had been implemented.

Edge DNS is a Content Delivery Network (CDN), providing a similar service to Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront or Fastly.

Last month, large parts of the internet went down when Fastly

began experiencing issues

.