Major DNS outage hits big websites - now fixed

The disruption hit Amazon, UPS, YouTube and others

Several prominent digital platforms faced an outage on Thursday, following a service disruption from content distribution network Akamai.

A large number of users reported they were unable to access many websites, including Amazon, Delta Airlines, UPS, US Bank, Home Depot, FedEx, Airbnb and YouTube.

HBO's streaming services and some Microsoft gaming platforms were also affected.

The disruption began shortly after 11:00 Eastern Time (16:00 BST), and at least 33,000 websites globally were inaccessible at the peak.

Reports on Downdetector showed about 4,000 issues on Airbnb's website, while 1,800 Home Depot users also reported issues.

Immediately after users began to complain, Akamai stated that it was investigating the cause.

'We are aware of an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service,' read a message on the company's website.

Minutes later, the company tweeted that it had implemented a fix and that services were resuming normally.

The firm added that it would continue to monitor the issue to fully mitigate the impact.

In a statement, Oracle said, 'We are monitoring a global issue related to Akamai edge DNS that is impacting access to many internet resources, including Oracle cloud properties. Resources within the Oracle cloud are continuing to run and are not impacted by this event.'

According to Akamai, the disruption 'was not a result of a cyberattack on the Akamai platform'. Rather, it was down to a bug in the DNS system, which was triggered following a software configuration update.

DNS acts as the internet's phone directory, translating domain names into machine-readable IP addresses.

This massive internet outage comes more than a month after a major internet blackout (caused by US-based CDN provider Fastly) left many of the world's top websites offline.

Fastly blamed a software bug for the glitch, saying it was triggered after a customer updated their settings.

Fastly's CDN system is one of the biggest on the internet, along with similar networks operated by Cloudflare, Akamai and Amazon's CloudFront.

In November last year, a major outage at AWS impacted thousands of online sites and services, including Amazon's own services. Amazon later revealed that the service disruption was caused by adding new servers to Kinesis. The company promised that it would apply lessons learned to improve the reliability of its services.