London, June 17: Several major Australian banks suffered website crashes on Thursday, according to the tracking site Downdetector.

Issues were reported with the sites of ANZ, Westpac, St George, ME bank, Macquarie Bank, Allianz, and the Commonwealth Bank.

Banking apps have also been affected.

Early on Thursday, multiple airlines in the US and Australia also suffered outages - including American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines, and Virgin Australia.

It's unclear if the outages are linked.

"We understand that some of our customers are currently experiencing issues accessing our services," Commonwealth Bank told AFP. "This issue is affecting multiple organisations, including many of the major banks."

About an hour later, at 16:15 local time, CommBank tweeted that services were starting to return to normal and thanked customers for their patience.

Australian tech commentator Trevor Long suggested that problems with web services company Akamai could be behind the wave of issues.

Akamai provides one of the world's largest content delivery networks (CDNs).

Earlier in June, an internal problem at another large CDN, Fastly, prompted an hour-long outage at a number of high-profile websites including Amazon, Reddit, and the UK government site.