Akamai says it has fixed issues that affected many websites

Akamai Technologies Inc., which handles web content delivery, said it has resolved an issue that caused a service disruption for several widely used websites. The company said the disruption was caused when a software configuration update triggered a flaw in the system that directs browsers to websites.

The incident wasn’t related to a cyberattack, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company said, and it lasted for as long as an hour.

Akamai shares dropped less than 1% to about $117. The reported outages, which included airlines, insurance companies and websites for various other industries, began to spike at about 11:30 a.m. and continued surging an hour later, according to Downdetector. Internet users reported widespread issues with prominent sites, including Amazon.com, Home Depot, Airbnb and United Parcel Service according to Downdetector.com, which monitors web outages.

Other sites that appear to have been affected include Delta Air Lines, streaming services run by HBO, gaming sites run by Microsoft and financial service companies such as Capital One .

Delta said its website and app were back working normally after being “briefly impacted Thursday by a technical issue a vendor was having that impacted websites globally.”

Akamai is known for providing protection against distributed denial of service attacks, otherwise known as DDoS, in which a website is overwhelmed with junk traffic. The product that was affected, Akamai’s Edge DNS, offers cloud-based domain hosting and security services for both on-premises networks and large-scale data centers. According to Akamai’s Twitter page, the bug in the software update was in the DNS system, which translates domain names into IP addresses.