US, Australian banks and airlines web outage was not because of 'cyberattack': Akamai

Akamai, US-based and one of the world’s largest content delivery networks (CDNs), on June 17 said that the hours-long website outage of American and Australian banks and airlines was “not caused by a system update or a cyberattack.” In a statement on Thursday, the tech provider said that around 500 of its customers were briefly knocked offline because of the issue considering one of its online security products. Issues were 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. 

Akamai said in a statement, “We detected the issue immediately, and impacted customers received an error alert within seconds. The impact was limited to Akamai customers using version 3.0 of the Routed service. Many of the approximately 500 customers using this service were automatically rerouted, which restored operations within a few minutes. The large majority of the remaining customers manually rerouted shortly thereafter.”

“The issue was not caused by a system update or a cyberattack. A routing table value used by this particular service was inadvertently exceeded. The effect was an unanticipated disruption of service. We restored the service by 8:47 AM UTC, and customers began the process of routing back on to the service at that time,” it added.

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 had previously 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.

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.

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