Web down: Thousands of sites worldwide go dark after cloud services provider Akamai reports DNS ‘issue’

Video games, travel, web streaming services, banking, and shipping were among the industries affected by a problem with cloud provider Akamai Technologies, which appeared to have taken thousands of websites offline worldwide.

Google, AT&T, Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and GoDaddy domain services were among the companies that started reporting outages on Thursday morning.

Akamai is experiencing a service disruption. We are actively investigating the issue and will provide an update in 30 minutes.

— Akamai Technologies (@Akamai) July 22, 2021

Gaming platforms Steam and PlayStation Network, travel services Expedia and Airbnb, shipping giants UPS and FedEx, and banking and financial institutions such as Chase, Discover, Capital One, Fidelity, and American Express were among others to report disruptions to their web services.

The problem appears to be due to an “emergency issue” with the Edge DNS service at the provider Akamai, which said it was “aware” of the problem and “actively investigating” it. The Domain Name System (DNS) acts as the internet directory, translating website names (URL) into IP addresses.

The Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) is supposed to be decentralized, but it's become concentrated among major providers. Akamai, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, next to the MIT campus, has rendered huge swaths of the Internet inaccessible due to a massive 'Edge DNS' fail pic.twitter.com/Cton7uNcH4

— Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) July 22, 2021

Shortly before 1pm Eastern Time, Akamai issued an update saying it had “implemented a fix” that had resulted in the service ”resuming normal operations.”  The company said the incident was “not a result of a cyberattack,” but occurred when "a software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system."

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