Major Australian banks, US airline briefly hit by widespread internet outrages

Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the United States were briefly down. This is the second major blackout in just over a week. This is caused by a glitch in an important piece of internet infrastructure. Server-related glitches at content delivery network (CDN) provider Akamai had occurred.

This glitch had hampered services at Australian banks, and many U.S. airlines, including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, also reported an hour-long outage. This disruption is linked to technical issues at Akamai. Before that there was an outage at rival Fastly Inc, that had affected a number of popular websites. That had happened one week before this. An Akamai spokesperson said that this impacted platform is now up and running. He also added that the company was continuing to validate services.

A bug in Akamai’s software has caused this outage. And that has since been fixed, and was not caused by a cyber-attack or vulnerability. Akamai is one of the largest providers of CDN services. This is used by companies to speed up the delivery of data-heavy content, videos and games to web pages. Several U.S. websites, which were hit by the outage, were backed up later. In a statement one southwest spokesperson said that their website and other internet-based tools are back up and running after a brief outage later. And also, they are continuing to look into the root cause of that outage but it is believed to be related to the broad Akamai outage.

American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines didn’t give any comments immediately after this. In Australia, websites of the central bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group had come back online very sooner. Virgin Australia said that it was one of many organizations to experience an outage with the Akamai content delivery system. Akamai shares were down 0.15% at $116.56 on that day.