Something bad happened to the Internet yesterday. It wasn’t your connection. Steam, Amazon, HBO Max, and many other popular websites went offline and experienced problems.
It wasn’t until we visited the homepage of DownDetector that we discovered many of the most popular sites on the Internet are not loading correctly. The outage covered a wide range of content, from transportation companies such as FedEx and UPS to media platforms such as PlayStation Network.
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What was believed to be the cause was an outage at Akamai, an Internet security giant that provides corporate network and content delivery services. Around 11am EST, Akamai reported an Edge DNS issue. This is a service designed to keep websites, applications and services running smoothly and securely.
Although the DNS service is critical to the structure of the Internet, it is known to be buggy and has the potential to be easily manipulated by malicious attackers. Companies like Akamai are building their own DNS services aimed at solving some of these problems for their customers. However, when a problem occurs, such as an outage, it can lead to a knock-on effect on websites or services that depend on it.
Akamai said “we are actively investigating this issue,” but when reached a spokesperson wouldn’t confirm that the service outage caused the other sites or services to go down. However, a spokesperson for ThousandEyes, an internet surveillance company acquired by Cisco in 2020, said the blackout came from Akamai.
The company, however, said in a tweet that the outage was “not the result of a cyberattack.”
This is not the first time a large-scale power outage has occurred. Last year, Cloudflare, a global provider of corporate network services, experienced similar interruptions after a bug that stopped loading major sites such as Shopify, Discord, and Politico.
In November, Amazon’s cloud service also experienced problems and stopped updating its status page. Notion, an online workspace startup, also experienced a notable outage this year, asking the company to turn to Twitter for help.
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