Massive outage disrupts internet services in Canada and around the world | CBC News

Thousands of websites and digital services around the world were unavailable on Thursday after cloud computing company Akamai experienced what it called a "service incident."

Akamai, a Massachusetts-based company whose services work behind the scenes to keep large portions of the internet functioning, said on its website that it is "aware of an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service."

DNS stands for Domain Names System, which, broadly speaking, is how Internet Protocol or IP addresses read by computers get translated into words that can be read by humans.