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

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

The incident is believed to be linked to Akamai Technologies, a content delivery network.

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 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.

CDNs speed up the internet by keeping copies of websites’ data in various locations around the world, so computers do not have to wait long for long periods of time to talk to sites on the other side of the world.

Last month, large parts of the internet went down when CDN Fastly began experiencing issues.