Several airlines, banks and technology websites were coming back online yesterday afternoon after a brief outage, the third such widespread incident noted in just a span of two months, raising alarms across social media.
Websites of Delta Air Lines, Costco Wholesale Corp, American Express, and Home Depot were down, displaying domain name system (DNS) service errors.
Cloud services provider Akamai Technologies had given an alert on its “Edge DNS” service incident, noting a “partial outage” on its website.
“We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations,” it said later in a tweet. “We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated.”
About 3,500 users reported issues with Airbnb’s website, while nearly 1,500 Home Depot users reported problems, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.
Oracle Corp said it was monitoring the global issue related to a cloud-based DNS solution provider impacting access to many internet resources, including its own cloud services.
The DNS is a service that translates readable domain names to machine readable IP addresses, connecting it to a server and delivering the requested page on the user’s phone or laptop.
In June, multiple outages hit social media, government and news websites across the globe, including the White House, the New York Times, Reddit, and Amazon were temporarily hit after a glitch with cloud computing services provider Fastly.
The incidents draw attention to the stability of economically-vital online platforms and the key role that a handful of little-known “CDN” – content delivery network – companies play in keeping the Web running.
(Representative photo)
