Why Thousands Of Websites Like Amazon, McDonald’s, Airbnb Went Down Globally
Image via ID 168037071 © Mykhailo Polenok | Dreamstime.com
In one fell swoop at about 10am ET on Thursday, several websites, apps, and services were taken offline due to a glitch suffered by cloud company Akamai Technologies Inc. Reuters notes that this is the second major outage related to the firm in about a month.
DownDetector documented dozens of outages for popular websites like Amazon, Airbnb, Delta Air Lines, McDonald’s, American Express, Oracle, Home Depot, HBO Max, FedEx, Costco Wholesale Corp, and PlayStation Network, according to reports by BGR and Reuters. It is believed that over 32,000 websites were affected.
Oracle and Amazon both said that several of their offerings, including their cloud services, were impacted globally due to the disruption.
Thankfully, services resumed an hour later. Akamai confirmed that the blackout was the result of a bug in a software update for its domain name system (DNS), and that it had rolled out a fix. The company also stressed that the error was not caused by a cyberattack.
DNS allows users to access websites through a domain name, which serves as a gateway to a cloud network where content can be loaded.
“We are reviewing our software update process to prevent future disruptions,” said Akamai.
DownDetector is a bloodbath thanks to this Akamai outage. https://t.co/HQmXQ66nmm pic.twitter.com/MDPMnKUATE
— Duane Sibilly, Bit Plumber (@valthonis) July 22, 2021
Akamai Summarizes Service Disruption (RESOLVED)
— Akamai Technologies (@Akamai) July 22, 2021
At 15:46 UTC today, a software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system, the system that directs browsers to websites. This caused a disruption impacting availability of some customer websites. (1/3)
We apologize for the inconvenience that resulted. We are reviewing our software update process to prevent future disruptions. (3/3)
— Akamai Technologies (@Akamai) July 22, 2021
[via BGR and Reuters, cover image via ID 168037071 © Mykhailo Polenok | Dreamstime.com]
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