Some of the outages, including people who affected Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp. and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd.
A plethora of internet sites operated by financial institutions, governments and airlines including Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd. and Australia’s financial institution went down briefly Thursday within the second global internet outage in as many weeks.
Some of the outages, including people who affected Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp. and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., were linked to a failure at Akamai Technologies Ltd., which helps clients manage web services, people conversant in the matter said, asking to not be identified discussing internal affairs. The Federal Reserve Bank of Australia was forced to cancel a scheduled bond-buying operation Thursday, blaming “technical difficulties.” A representative for Akamai in Asia didn’t answer emails and calls seeking comment.
The widespread downtime recalled an hour-long global outage earlier this month, triggered by a software failure at content delivery platform Fastly Inc. The resultant cascading failures, which affected services from Amazon.com Inc. to Shopify Inc. and Stripe Inc., served as a stark reminder of how exposed the world’s biggest websites are to the impact of disruptions starting from simple human error to coordinated cyberattack.
Website tracker Downdetector.com initially flagged many user complaints about outages affecting Southwest Airlines Co., Delta Air Lines Inc. and Automatic processing Inc. Other websites pinpointed included those operated by Vanguard, E-Trade and Navy Federal depository financial institution .
Many of the websites affected on Thursday recovered within the hour, some after rerouting to other providers. Companies including Hong Kong’s exchange and Southwest said they were investigating the incident, without elaborating. “The pause in connectivity didn't impact our operation,” Southwest said in an emailed response to questions.
It was unclear what triggered the incidents Thursday. In Fastly’s case, a legitimate software configuration change by one among its customers triggered a previously undiscovered bug, introduced during a May 12 software deployment. Fastly quickly identified a drag with its content delivery network and announced it had been rolling out a fix just 46 minutes after acknowledging a problem. Sites began to spring back to life soon afterward.
Akamai is one among variety of high-level website and application hosting services that enormous enterprises use to serve content to many users simultaneously.
Rather than hosting all website content on one set of servers in one location, Fastly’s so-called “edge computing” model puts servers in dozens of locations, allowing websites to serve pages to users from physical locations closest to them. This cuts lag time, speeding up page-loading and spreading the burden on individual servers.
These vast and sophisticated setups are travel by just a couple of companies, like Fastly and Cloudflare Inc. the worldwide edge computing market was valued at $4.68 billion in 2020 and is predicted to expand at a compound annual rate of growth of 38.4% from 2021 to 2028, consistent with a recent analysis by Grand View Research.
While these setups usually work perfectly, their complexity means even an easy error during a configuration file can trigger chain reactions of outages. For users, most of whom rarely got to believe how the web works, which will come as a shock.
