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Much of the internet was disconnected on Thursday. Some of the most popular sites, apps, and services on the internet were down, including UPS and FedEx (which have since returned online), Airbnb, Fidelity and others report that Steam, LastPass, and the PlayStation Network are all going through rough times. ‘stop.
Many other websites around the world are also affected, including media in Europe.
What appears to be the cause is an outage at Akamai, an internet security giant that provides networking and content delivery services to businesses. At around 11 a.m. ET, Akamai reported an issue with its Edge DNS, a service designed to keep websites, apps, and services running smoothly and securely.
DNS services are of critical importance to the functioning of the Internet, but are known to have bugs and can be easily manipulated by malicious actors. Companies like Akamai have created their own DNS services to address some of these issues for their customers. But when things go wrong or there is an outage, it can have a ripple effect on all the websites and customer services that depend on it.
Akamai said it was “actively investigating the issue,” but when contacted, a spokesperson did not say if its outage was the cause of disruption to other sites and services currently offline. A spokesperson for ThousandEyes, an internet monitoring company acquired by Cisco in 2020, attributed the outage to Akamai.
Akamai did not say what caused the problem, but that it was already being recovered.
“We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations. We will continue to monitor to ensure the impact has been fully mitigated,†Akamai told TechCrunch.
In a follow-up tweet, the company said it was “not the result of a cyber attack.”
This is not the first time that we have seen an outage of this magnitude. Last year, Cloudflare, which also provides networking services to businesses around the world, experienced a similar outage following a bug that caused major sites to stop loading, including Shopify, Discord. and Politico. In November, Amazon’s cloud service also tripped, preventing it from updating its own status page during the incident. Online workspace startup Notion also experienced a high-profile outage this year, forcing the company to take to Twitter for help.
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