Big banking, booking, streaming and gaming websites went down early Friday during a widespread global outage. Visitors to websites such as Airbnb, HSBC, UPS, the PlayStation Network and British Airways were met with a DNS error message.
Visitors to the websites went on social media to share their experiences. The flood of posts indicated a major outage that affected users from all over the world. Internet outage monitoring website DownDetector said it had received thousands of reports across dozens of internet browsers and applications.
The outage was eventually linked to a DNS provider called Akamai. The company published a post on social media stating that it was experiencing an issue with its Edge DNS service. DNS - short for Domain Name Service - is a sort of phonebook for websites. It is used to direct visitors to the right computer servers the website they are visiting is hosted.
After a few hours, Akamai reported that it was able to fix the problem and that its services are now operating normally. The company said that the problem was caused by an error in an update it had installed. The company said the outage was not caused by a hack as some reports had indicated.
"We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations. We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated," Akamai said in its post.
DNS outage takes down large chunk of the internet — Steam, HBO Max, and more are all offline https://t.co/vrn5w6gyjE pic.twitter.com/rlaFOGqTbC — Android Police (@AndroidPolice) July 22, 2021
Even after its announcement, some users still reported problems. As some websites began to get back online in Europe and the U.S., some websites remained inaccessible in some Asian countries.
Experts said the DNS issue caused some internet browsers and applications to have problems in finding the content being searched. According to DownDetector, the issue caused problems with banking services such as Barclays, TSB, Lloyds and Halifax. Gaming services provided by Steam and EA also encountered issues.
The incident was the second major international outage to occur in the past two months. Last month, cloud computing company Fastly encountered problems with its services. The issue took down several high-profile websites for users across the globe, including major online newspapers and government websites. Fastly said the problem was caused by a settings change made by one customer, which affected its entire network infrastructure.
