The Airbnb, British Airways and Delta Air Lines websites were among many hit by a widespread global online outage on Thursday.
Users attempting to reach some sites received DNS errors, meaning their requests could not reach the websites.
Other affected services included UPS, banks and the PlayStation network used for online games.
Others reporting the second similar outage in two months included the streaming services of ITV and Channel 4.
A message on the BA website read: “Service Unavailable – DNS failure. The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.”
A message on Airbnb’s site said: “This site can’t be reached.”
As some websites began to appear again for users in Europe and the US, others in Asian nations continued to report problems.
Cloud-based DNS provider Akamai Technologies reported “an emerging issue” with its Edge DNS service.
It then tweeted after less than an hour that the issue had been fixed and “the service is resuming normal operations”.
The company said a software update had triggered a bug in its DNS service resulting in the outages and confirmed that he issue was not due to a cyberattack.
Internet outage monitoring platform DownDetector had reported thousands of problems from its users across dozens of platforms, according to the BBC.
DNS – Domain Name System – turns the human-readable web addresses into addresses that point to a computer server somewhere online.
Disruptions often mean that a web browser cannot find the content it is looking for.