Major global outage briefly knocks out websites of top banks, airlines

HONG KONG: A plethora of websites operated by financial institutions, governments and airlines, including Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing and Australia’s central bank, went down briefly on Thursday in the second global internet outage in as many weeks.

Some of the outages, including those that affected Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group, were linked to a failure at Akamai Technologies, which helps clients manage web services, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified discussing internal affairs.

The Reserve Bank of Australia was forced to cancel a scheduled bond-buying operation on Thursday, blaming “technical difficulties”.

A representative for Akamai in Asia didn’t respond to emails and calls seeking comment.

The widespread downtime recalled an hour-long global outage earlier this month, triggered by a software failure at content delivery platform Fastly.

The resultant cascading failures, which affected services from Amazon.com Inc. to Shopify and Stripe, served as a stark reminder of how exposed the world’s biggest websites are to the impact of disruptions ranging from simple human error to coordinated cyberattack.

Website tracker Downdetector.com initially flagged hundreds of user complaints about outages affecting Southwest Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Automatic Data Processing. Other websites pinpointed included those operated by Vanguard, E-Trade and Navy Federal Credit Union.

Many of the websites affected on Thursday recovered within the hour, some after rerouting to other providers. Companies including Hong Kong’s exchange and Southwest said they were investigating the incident, without elaborating. “The pause in connectivity did not impact our operation,” Southwest said in an emailed response to questions.

It was unclear what triggered the incidents on Thursday. In Fastly’s case, a valid software configuration change by one of its customers triggered a previously undiscovered bug, introduced during a May 12 software deployment.

Fastly quickly identified an issue with its content delivery network and announced it was rolling out a fix just 46 minutes after acknowledging a problem. Sites began to spring back to life soon afterwards.