A major internet outage has affected the websites of major retail, financial, logistics and travel websites, while 911 service in several Virginia cities appears to be affected by a cut fiber optic cable.

Down Detector, a service that detects whether websites are working properly or not, began reporting a series of at least 50 major website outages shortly before 12pm EST on Thursday.

The websites of UPS, Delta Air Lines, Costco, American Express and Home Depot were down, displaying domain name system (DNS) service errors.