By Joseph Chalfant
Major companies and financial institutions experienced website outages internationally on the morning of June 17.
According to CNN Business, companies that suffered from the outages include Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, Westpac Bank, the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and Virgin Australia. Delta Airlines was also knocked offline.
The outlet reported that the Los Angeles International Airport also faced difficulties. A spokesman for the airport said they had minor disruptions but required no serious delays or cancellations.
The outages began at 1:10 AM eastern time and lasted for over an hour. According to BBC News, Massachusetts-based content delivery network (CDN) provider Akamai admitted to being the source of the problem. CDNs are a network of cloud servers dispersed geographically to improve the speed and quality of streaming and internet services.
“We are aware of the issue and [are] actively working to restore services as soon as possible.”
Details on what caused the outages are scarce, but Akamai may release more information after services return to normal.
“Akamai can confirm the segment of our Prolexic platform impacted is up and running and we are continuing to validate services. We will share more details of what transpired, but our first priority is ensuring all customer impact is mitigated,” Akamai spokesman Chris Nicholson told NPR.
NPR reported that the outages also impacted Discover and Navy Federal Credit union.
The technical glitch comes just days after thousands of websites utilizing cloud company Fastly experienced outages. Major news companies, social media platforms, and government websites were affected.
Outages like Fastly and Akamai could lead to faster diagnosis and improvement of services across the industry.
After the June 8 Fastly outage, Piper Sandler & Co analyst told Reuters, “In the grand scheme of things, we actually think that this is a little bit of a positive for other CDNs and also just shows how difficult managing a CDN can be.”
While outages now may be an inconvenience to companies and consumers, some experts are worried that the centralization of CDNs could pose a threat to internet stability in the event of a cyber-attack.
“Worst case, it’s going to be an attack on Cloudflare. The Russian government or the Chinese government is going to take down Cloudflare and it’s going to break the internet,” UC Berkeley cybersecurity research fellow Nick Merrill told ABC 17.
