Mass outage saw websites including PlayStation, Airbnb and HSBC go offline

Major banking services, streaming sites and gaming networks were among a number of websites and apps affected by a global outage which briefly caused disruption on Thursday.

Banks including Barclays, TSB, the Bank of Scotland, Tesco Bank and Sainsbury’s Bank were either entirely or partially inaccessible for a short period.

Airbnb, the PlayStation Network and Steam also experienced the temporary glitch, with some showing users a DNS error.

Unconfirmed reports suggest the problem may be linked to a performance product offered by Akamai, an American firm which began investigating issues just after 5pm UK time.

Its Edge DNS service is designed to improve loading times and combat attacks, using a network of servers dotted around the world.

Akamai tweeted: ‘We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations.

‘We are continuing to monitor the situation and can confirm this was not a result of a cyberattack on the Akamai platform.’

Tracking website DownDetector started showing a sharp fall in reports from users of the affected sites shortly afterwards.

Akamai later apologised in a further series of tweets: ‘At 15:46 UTC today, a software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system, the system that directs browsers to websites. This caused a disruption impacting availability of some customer websites.

‘The disruption lasted up to an hour. Upon rolling back the software configuration update, the services resumed normal operations. Akamai can confirm this was not a cyberattack against Akamai’s platform.

‘We apologise for the inconvenience that resulted. We are reviewing our software update process to prevent future disruptions.’

The incident follows a similar outage six weeks ago, which impacted prominent websites including gov.uk offline.

US-based Fastly said the issues experienced on June 8 were down to an ‘undiscovered software bug’ in its system which was triggered by a single unnamed customer who updated their settings.

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