At 17.09 BST the content delivery and cloud service company published an update stating that it is aware of an "emerging issue with the Edge DNS service" and is "actively investigating the issue."

Around an hour later the firm tweeted that it had "implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations".

The problem is "not a result of a cyberattack".

Cloudflare defines DNS or Domain Name System as the phonebook of the internet, and is responsible for finding the correct IP address for sites typed into web browsers. Browsers then use those addresses to communicate with origin servers or CDN edge servers to access website information.

Outage tracker downdetector.co.uk shows that a swathe of payments, entertainment and media companies have been hit. Customers of financial services firms around the world have been unable to access online services.

The outage is not the first for Akamai, which on June 17th was reported to have experienced an outage "related to the lack of capacity to a certain "routing table" of their distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation." 

Responding to Finextra's request for comment, Akamai stated:

"At 15:46 UTC yesterday, a software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system, the system that directs browsers to websites. This caused a disruption impacting availability of some customer websites. The disruption lasted up to an hour. Upon rolling back the software configuration update, the services resumed normal operations.

"Akamai can confirm this was not a cyberattack against Akamai’s platform."

"We apologise for the inconvenience that resulted. We are reviewing our software update process to prevent future disruptions."

This story has been updated to include comment from Akamai.