Banks, brokerages, PSN, Steam Store, and more are all down due to massive internet outages

[ad_1]

Several websites – including banking, brokerage and gaming services pages – were affected for just over an hour Thursday, as part of a major internet outage. During the outage, consumers were unable to access services such as Ally Bank, Fidelity, Sony PlayStation Network, Airbnb, and more. Several airline websites were also affected: the Delta, British Airways, and Southwest sites were either down, or had important functions such as downtime for check-ins.

Many sites seem to be working again after Akamai, a content delivery network that hosts much of the Internet, started rolling out a fix on its service. “We are continuing to monitor the situation and can confirm that this was not the result of a cyber attack on the Akamai platform,” Akamai says in an email to The Verge.

It soon became clear that Akamai was involved, with several websites attributing the outage to the CDN provider. Larger outlets included the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and The Times of India, which tweeted that the outage was due to Akamai. Cloudflare’s CEO spoke to say its service is not responsible.

Some of our digital services are currently affected due to outages at Akamai, our content delivery network. We are working to restore our services as quickly as possible.

– The Times Of India (@timesofindia) on July 22, 2021

We understand that some customers may experience issues with our platforms. We are working urgently to resolve the issues. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate being a customer.

– Fidelity Investments (@Fidelity) July 22, 2021

Game services have also been hit hard by internet issues. DownDetector reported that the number of users experiencing problems with the PlayStation Network has risen to over 40,000, and the Steam store has also encountered functional issues. DownDetector has also reported issues with games like Fortnite and Call of Duty. Sony’s PSN status page acknowledged an issue shortly before publishing this post: “PlayStation Network Services are up and running, but there are external Internet-wide issues that may affect your experience,” the company wrote.

Some sites displayed error messages during the outage, while others failed to load them all together. Pingdom’s live map shows that the issue has been global.

In terms of more essential services, it appears that a number of bank websites have gone non-functioning during the outage, and there have been reports of 911 systems downtime across multiple states. However, it’s not clear if the emergency services outage was related to other web outages — the Grayson County, Virginia, Sheriff’s Department stated that the 911 outage was caused by a fiber cut, which is now fixed.

Outages like these show that while the web is decentralized in theory, the functionality of many major sites is dependent on a few companies. In June, one customer hit a glitch that disrupted Fastly’s CDN service — and with it Reddit, Twitch, and The Verge went down. Amazon Web Services issues have also caused major outages in the past.

[ad_2]