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Posted: 06/18/2021 16:44:58 PM
A software bug at a major network provider briefly took dozens of financial institutions, airlines and other businesses around the world offline during peak hours in Asia.
Akamai, which operates one of the major Internet content delivery systems, said Thursday’s outage was not caused by a cyber attack, but rather by a software bug on a service that protects customers from attacks by denied service.
Most of the affected 500 Akamai customers had their traffic redirected within minutes, but it took more than four hours to fully restore the system, the Massachusetts-based company said. Akamai operates mirrors of customer websites in 135 countries, called edge servers, which are designed to speed up access to customer websites.
The Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the four largest US airlines were among those affected. Akamai does not name its customers but says they include more than 300 global banks, more than 30 airlines, more than 200 national government agencies and 825 retailers.
Numerous blackouts have been reported by Australians trying to bank, book flights and access postal services by mid-afternoon. Many services were operational again after about an hour.
Banking services have been severely disrupted, with Westpac, the Commonwealth, ANZ and St George, as well as the website for the Reserve Bank of Australia, the country’s central bank. The Reserve Bank canceled a bond purchase transaction due to technical difficulties encountered by several banks that were to participate.
Virgin Australia airline was also hit and cited Akamai’s content delivery system. He said the flights had largely worked as expected after it restored access to its website and contact center for guests.
Outages briefly increased on US airlines, Delta, United and Southwest. Because the disruption happened late at night in the United States with few planes taking off, airline officials said there was little to no effect on flights.
Southwest, which suffered two other unrelated tech glitches this week, said its website and other internet tools were briefly disconnected but flights were unaffected. United said there were no lingering issues early on Thursday.
The disruption came just days after many of the world’s largest websites briefly went offline due to a software outage at Fastly, another large web services company. The company blamed the issue on a software bug that was triggered when a single customer changed a setting.
Brief Internet service outages are not uncommon and are rarely the result of hacking or other mischief. However, recent blackouts have underscored just how vital a small number of companies behind the scenes have become to operating the Internet.
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