Akamai Outage Takes Down Global Banks, Airline Websites

An issue with Akamai Technologies’ network took down or disrupted services for many global companies early Thursday, marking the second global content delivery network failure so far in June.

In the second widespread global content delivery network failure this month, an Akamai Technologies’ system issue caused Internet outages for global airlines, banks, and stock exchanges on Thursday.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company is not yet disclosing the cause of the service disruptions for its hosting platform, which helps defend against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. But Akamai has acknowledged the issue, which began in the early morning hours.

The Akamai outage comes nine days after a service configuration issue at content delivery cloud provider Fastly caused a massive, global internet outage that impacted website Reddit, video streaming service Twitch and a number of news sites including CNN and The New York Times.

[Related: The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2020]

“Akamai is aware of the issue and actively working to restore services as soon as possible,” the tech firm posted on Twitter Thursday morning.

Downdetector.com, which provides real-time outage monitoring, showed spikes in complaints about service outages for websites of companies inside the U.S. as well as in a number of other countries including Australia, Germany and India.

The disruption on Thursday affected several large companies around the globe, including Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Bank, and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, as well as the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s website.

Services have since been restored for many of the companies impacted Thursday morning.