TORONTO - Canadian companies and other global businesses say their websites and services are fully operational again after they experienced technical difficulties or outages this afternoon.

Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Montreal and PC Financial all told customers on Twitter that their websites are back up after earlier informing people that they were aware of technical issues and working to resolve them.

Monitoring website Down Detector showed a sharp increase in reported technical difficulties on the three companies' websites after 12 p.m. Eastern time, along with Bank of Nova Scotia and Air Canada.

The websites of Airbnb, AT&T, Costco and Delta showed error messages around midday, but now appear to be operating normally.

While many of the companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment or share the cause of the outages, cloud services provider Akamai Technologies was reporting a service disruption and said it had implemented a fix.

Akamai assured Twitter users that the disruption was not the result of a cyberattack and said it continues to monitor the situation.

- with files from The Associated Press

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 22, 2021.