Massive internet outage affected Amazon, Playstation and dozens of others
Several platforms were temporarily affected by a massive power failure. (Screenshot: Down Detector / t3n)
Part of the Internet had temporarily stopped working: shopping sites, airlines and server services were down for over an hour. At the center was one of the pillars of network traffic.
In the early Thursday evening, part of the Internet was idle for around an hour. Some of the largest websites in the world were temporarily unavailable. Akamai Technologies, the company responsible for the massive Internet failure in the meantime, finally announced that the error had been fixed. Now precautions should be taken to ensure that such a failure cannot happen again. The company also apologized. According to Akamai Technologies, it was not a cyber attack.
The list of unusual platforms reads like a who’s who of the modern Internet. It ranges from Amazon and its AWS services to gaming platforms such as Steam and EA to big players such as Microsoft, Airbnb and Evernote as well as German news sites such as tagesschau.de. That reports the Independent with reference to the Downdetector portal.
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An error in the DNS system triggered an Internet failure
Guilt is apparently a mistake in the Akamai Edge DNS Service. The Domain Name System coordinates website addresses and their IP addresses. If a DNS server does not work, the assignment no longer works. Akamai optimizes the load distribution of web content and serves as a higher-level cloud service for around 3,500 business customers, including Microsoft, Facebook and various authorities and platforms.
According to Akamai, an update of the software configuration at 5:46 p.m. German time triggered an error in the DNS system. This is the system that directs browsers to websites. Akamai Technologies said that this bug resulted in a disruption that affected the availability of some customer websites via Twitter. After the update was reset, the services resumed normal operation after about an hour.
