Updated June 17th, 2021 at 14:11 IST
Australian, US banks and airlines hit by website outage, experts suggest CDN issue
Websites of several major banks and airlines in Australia and the United States (US) suffered crashes on June 17, according to tracking site Downdetector.
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Websites of several major banks and airlines in Australia and the United States suffered crashes on June 17, according to tracking site Downdetector. Issues have been reported with websites and banking apps of ANZ, Westpac, St George, ME bank, Macquarie Bank, Allianz, and the Commonwealth Bank in Australia. Earlier on Thursday, multiple airlines in the US and Australia including American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines, and Virgin Australia also witnessed outages. AS per the BBC report, it still remains unclear if the website outages are linked.
Airline Virgin Australia posted to Twitter: "We are currently experiencing a system outage which is impacting our website and Guest Contact Centre." meanwhile, Australia Post, the country’s postal service also said that some services crashed by an “external outage.”
Nearly every bank Australia wide is down. Sit back make a coffee and watch the anarchy of Twitter work it’s magic #westpac #ANZ #Commonwealth #mebank pic.twitter.com/pYpQJJIag3
— Mitchell Adam (@MitchellAdam9)
About an hour of users flagging the crashing of the official website, CommBank tweeted that services were starting to return to normal while thanking the customers for their patience. Australian tech commentator Trevor Long suggested that issues with web services company such as Akamai could be behind the wave of outages that engulfed several sites on Thursday. Akamai is one of the world’s largest content delivery networks (CDNs). As per reports, the outages began around 14:10 Sydney time which were not limited to just the banks.
It is my understanding that Hosting and CDN provider Akamai is the company experiencing the issues and outages this afternoon. This is a global problem, of course the timezone makes it worst for us. No official word from them as to the root cause
— Trevor Long (@trevorlong)
Also no reason to believe, or not believe that it is a similar outage to the Fastly outage just recently, meaning questions will be asked about the nature of the outages and potential attacks.
— Trevor Long (@trevorlong)
Heads-Up customers: Most ANZ services look to be up and running but we're continuing to monitor and investigate. We're really sorry for any inconvenience caused by the recent issues. We'll let you know of any further updates here. From the ANZ Social Media Team.
— ANZ Australia (@ANZ_AU)
UPDATE: 4.15PM We are starting to see services return to normal following a tech outage that had widespread impact across businesses. Thank you for your patience - we're sorry to cause any inconvenience to your afternoon.
— CommBank (@CommBank)
High-profile website outages in June
A similar issue with Fastly, content delivery network (CDN) prompted an hour-long outage at a number of high-profile websites including Amazon, Reddit and the British government websites. The outage led to chaos on June 8 as multiple websites operated by news outlets, e-commerce sites, among others were down and displaying ‘Fastly error’ instead of loading the webpage. As per 9News Australia, the mass web outage is believed to be caused by a data centre provider named Fastly and it impacted several popular websites. Some of the affected websites include Amazon, Reddit, SMH, Age, NY Times, Twitch, Pinterest, The Guardian, AFR, BBC, Pinterest, and Financial Times, Unsplash.
Fastly said that it was due to an “undiscovered software bug”. In a statement, Nick Rockwell, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure at Fastly said, “We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change”.
“We detected the disruption within one minute, then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95 per cent of our network was operating as normal,” he added.
IMAGE: AP/Unsplash
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Published June 17th, 2021 at 14:11 IST