Banks Around The World Hit By Web Outage

A disruption at one of the world’s largest content delivery networks Thursday (June 17) briefly grounded the websites of several U.S. airlines and host of banks in Australia, the second such incident in a little over a week.

According to the BBC, the program originated with web services provider Akamai Technologies, and affected the websites and apps of banks such as ANZ, Westpac, St George, ME bank, Macquarie Bank, Allianz and the Commonwealth Bank.

The cybersecurity news service ThreatPost says the hour-long outage also affected the Hong Kong stock exchange, and was triggered by a backfiring distributed denial of service (DDos) mitigation service.

And National Public Radio says the issue also extended to at least two financial institutions in the U.S: Discovery and the Navy Federal Credit Union.

“Akamai can confirm the segment of our Prolexic platform impacted is up and running and we are continuing to validate services,” spokesperson Chris Nicholson told NPR. “We will share more details of what transpired, but our first priority is ensuring all customer impact is mitigated.”

Airlines including American, Southwest, Delta and United also experienced similar short outages, as did Australia’s postal service and Virgin Australia, the country’s second largest carrier.

The Massachusetts based Akamai runs one of the largest CDNs in the world, designed to speed load times for websites. Virgin tells the BBC it used the technology for IT network authentication.

Thursday’s outage comes a little more than a week after an outage at another CDN — Fastly — shut down several high-profile websites, including CNN, Twitch, The New York Times, Amazon, Reddit and the U.K. government site.

Fastly discovered the problem on June 8. The following day, the company reported its network had returned to normal within 49 minutes.

“We detected the disruption within one minute, then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95 percent of our network was operating as normal,” Senior Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure Nick Rockwell said in a company blog post.