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A global DNS outage related to the Akamai company made quite a stir on Thursday. The outage took down many websites and online services among which we can list Salesforce, Google, Amazon, AWS, Newegg, and PlayStation Network.
Who Is Akamai?
Akamai stands for an enterprise based on content delivery network (CDN), cloud services, and cybersecurity. Its services support the Internet and web security.
What Was the Cause of the DNS Global Outage?
As stated on Bleeping Computer, the issue seemed to be related to Akamai’s Edge DNS Service, which is an authoritative DNS solution hosted in the cloud whose role is to offer 24/7 DNS support and enhance the DNS receptivity, making websites, services and applications run properly and safely. Despite this discovery, Akamai extended its investigation.
The enterprise announced the server disruption immediately on Twitter and started working on it. However, it only lasted an hour, as per the representatives of the company’s declaration.
As per Akamai’s investigation, it resulted that the DNS system was affected by a bug related to a system configuration update that led to a system interruption for many client websites.
DNS Global Outage: Mitigation Measures
Akamai announced on Twitter that they fixed the issue meanwhile.
After further monitoring, the company came to the conclusion that this was not a cyberattack against the company and things should work fine from now on.
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.
The Impact of the Global DNS Outage
The DNS global outage had effects on various companies, for instance, the customers of Delta Air Lines were not able to do the online check-in for their flights.
It seems that some Oracle cloud properties were impacted also by this DNS global outage.
According to CNBC Website, other companies that showed DNS errors or slow page loading were UPS, AT&T, Vanguard, Go Daddy, Capital One, British Airways, LastPass, and Costco.
Outages Not Without a Precedent
Another networking providing services company went through a similar experience last year. It is about Cloudflare and big websites like Politico, Discord, and Shopify stopped loading.
In June this year Fastly CDN experienced an error in their services and websites like Amazon, Amazon Web Services (AWS), CNN, Debian.org, GOV.UK, GitHub, Reddit, Shopify, StackOverflow were also part of an outage.
What Is a DNS?
DNS or Domain Name System is basically the core Internet address book. Through domain names users access websites. For example, nytimes.com is a domain name. What DNS does it’s the fact that it translates the name of the domains into IP addresses.
Hi! My name is Andra and I am a passionate writer interested in a variety of topics. I am curious about the cybersecurity world and what I want to achieve through what I write is to keep you curious too!
