Massive internet outage comes today thanks to Akamai Edge DNS

[ad_1]

Zoom / “Dude, that can’t be DNS.” “How much do you want to bet?”

Today’s massive internet outage has resulted in downdetector.com being covered in warnings for popular websites and services, such as PlayStation Network, Steam, Fidelity Investments, Airbnb, FedEx, LastPass, UPS, Amazon, and others.

The root cause of the outage appears to be the failure of Akamai’s DNS service. Its system status page states that Akamai is aware of an “emerging issue with the Edge DNS service” – one of which has been traced back to the “Minor Service Outage”, with no further explanation as of press time.

I’m not yet sure why many sites online won’t load, but you’ve confirmed that it’s not a Cloudflare problem. Bad days happen to everyone, so I hope those who suffer from them are quickly resolved. #hojobs

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 22, 2021

According to Akamai, the fix has been implemented, and Edge DNS “resumes normal operations”. Akamai also states that the unspecified issue “was not the result of a cyber attack on the Akamai platform,” although there is no information yet as to what or what caused the issue.

The scale of widespread internet outages appears to be increasing, with some of the world’s largest sites often being hit the hardest. Today’s outage resulted from a DNS failure rather than a failure of the Content Delivery Network – but it underscores an important point.

The Internet was originally designed to be decentralized and error-resistant – but as the world’s largest sites and services cluster around a few huge infrastructure providers, failures at those providers have increasingly large impacts on the Internet ecosystem as a whole.

[ad_2]