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The websites of several major companies in Australia and beyond were temporarily down for many users on Thursday, analysts say was an outage caused by service outages at a hosting platform in the United States.
The outage was the second outage in the past two weeks that appeared to demonstrate widespread reliance on a handful of companies that maintain the plumbing that underpins the global internet.
The disruptions on Thursday impacted several Australian banks, the airline Virgin Australia and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, among other companies. There were also reports of service outages on the websites of companies in Germany, India and elsewhere.
Just as those websites failed, the website Downdetector.com, which tracks internet disruptions, said user reports showed: a spike in potential problems at Akamai, a service provider based in Massachusetts. Downdetector.com said reports began to peak around 12:10 a.m. Eastern time Thursday and began to decline about an hour later.
Cybersecurity experts in Australia wrote on social media that the outages at Akamai appeared to be the cause of the website down. The company said in a brief statement that it was aware of the issue and was in the process of restoring services.
In Australia, the outage impacted online and mobile banking at three major banks ANZ, Commonwealth and Westpac, as well as smaller banks including ME and Macquarie. Residents complained on social media that they were stuck at supermarket checkouts with no means of paying for groceries or that they were stuck at gas stations and unable to pay for fuel.
Westpac said in a statement that some of its services were affected by a third-party provider issue today, while ANZ said it was affected by an incident involving a third-party provider. Commonwealth Bank said it had been hit by a technical glitch.
The country’s other major bank, National Australia Bank, said its services had not been affected.
The Australian Post Office said a external interference had compromised some of his services.
Virgin Australia said in a statement that it was one of many organizations that experienced an outage with the Akamai content delivery system today, and we are working with them to ensure that the necessary measures are taken to prevent these outages from happening again.
Around 2 a.m. Eastern time in the United States, or late Thursday afternoon in Australia, a few Australian banks said their services were back online.
Last week, several major websites, including those of the British government, The New York Times, CNN, The Financial Times and The Guardian, were equally unreachable. Many of the affected sites appeared to have recovered after just under an hour.
That outage was attributable to Fastly, a provider of cloud computing services used by businesses around the world to manage their websites. Fastly, based in San Francisco, later said the problem had been identified and resolved.
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