Global Internet Outage Affects Major Companies

Strategic Insights -

Multiple major US companies, including airlines, banks, and IT companies, experienced significant website outages on Thursday, according to real-time monitoring by Downdetector. The issue, caused by a partial outage of Akamai Technologies' Edge DNS service, affected numerous prominent companies such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and McDonald's. The incident highlights the growing reliance on cloud services and the potential for widespread disruptions when they fail.

Key Takeaways:

  • The outage affected over 200 companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, McDonald's, FedEx, American Express, Delta Airlines, UPS, Steam, Airbnb, HBO Max, and many others.
  • The issue was caused by a partial outage of Akamai Technologies' Edge DNS service.
  • The outage resulted in thousands of reports of domain name system (DNS) errors, preventing users from accessing affected websites.
  • Akamai implemented a fix for the issue and reported that the service is resuming normal operations.
  • This is the third major Internet outage in two months, following similar incidents affecting airlines, banks, and stock exchanges.
  • Previous outages were caused by a bug in a service that helps mitigate distributed denial-of-service attacks.
  • In early June, dozens of websites were inaccessible for almost an hour due to a widespread failure at Internet service provider Fastly.

Statistics:

  • Over 200 companies were affected by the outage.
  • Thousands of users reported DNS errors and were unable to access affected websites.
  • Akamai implemented a fix for the issue within a short period of time.
  • The outage was attributed to a partial outage of Akamai's Edge DNS service.
  • This is the third major Internet outage in two months.
  • Previous outages affected airlines, banks, and stock exchanges.
  • 200+ companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, McDonald's, FedEx, American Express, Delta Airlines, UPS, Steam, Airbnb, HBO Max, reported outages.

Sources:

  • Downdetector portal
  • Akamai Technologies' tweet
  • Previous articles on Internet outages (no dates or specific references provided)