Another tweet from Akamai, confirming that today’s outages were not because it was hacked.

The company at the heart of today’s outage appear to consider it over. It has published a simple update to its status page that simply reads: “This incident has been mitigated”.

Websites appear to be returning back to normal, with tracking website Down Detector showing a drop in reports that is almost as quick as the initial spike.

Akamai – which is thought to be at the heart of today’s problems – says it has “implemented a fix” and that service is “resuming”.

In a tweet, Akamai – the internet infrastructure company suspected at being at the centre of the problems – has said it is experiencing a “service disruption”.

Akamai, which provides domain name system services, says that it is experiencing problems. There’s no guarantee this is the whole of the cause of the problem, but it does appear to be part of it, not least because many of the affected websites are featured on its customers page.

(Domain name system, or DNS, is something like the phone book or map of the internet – it matches up your computer with the websites it is looking for.)

“We are aware of an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service,” a message on its status page reads. “We are actively investigating the issue.”

Previous problems like this have not been the results of problems with the companies that run the website – but rather the companies that run the internet.

There was a similarly major outage just over a month ago, for instance, which was later tracked to a problem at Fastly. Even a small problem at one of these companies can very rapidly cause much of the internet to go offline, since there are a very limited number of organisations providing infrastructure that underpins all of the internet.

Here’s the UK version. Also very red – though obviously with some different websites and apps.

Here is the US version of Down Detector, showing all of the sites that people are reporting problems with:

Two of the most high-profile services to go down are for gaming – PlayStation Network and Steam, both of which appear to be offline.