Akamai Failure Triggers Global Internet Downtime On Thursday: Bloomberg

Multiple websites operated by financial institutions, governments, and airlines, including Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd and Australia’s central bank, went offline briefly in the second global internet outage on Thursday, Bloomberg reports.

What Happened: Akamai Technologies Inc’s AKAM network glitch affected the likes of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp WBK, and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd.

The Reserve Bank of Australia had to cancel a scheduled bond-buying operation due to the glitch. The central bank reportedly adopted workarounds and fixed the website.

Content delivery platform Fastly Inc’s FSLY software failure had triggered an hour-long global outage this month. The outage affected the likes of Amazon.com Inc AMZN, Shopify Inc SHOP, and Stripe Inc. Fastly quickly identified the issue and fixed it within 46 minutes after acknowledging the problem. Sites were also promptly restored.

Akamai acknowledged the issue and was actively working to restore services as soon as possible.

Website tracker Downdetector.com initially highlighted hundreds of user complaints about outages affecting Southwest Airlines Co LUV, Delta Air Lines Inc DAL, and Automatic Data Processing Inc ADP. Vanguard, E-Trade, and Navy Federal Credit Union-operated websites were also affected.

Why It Matters: Many of the websites affected on Thursday recovered within the hour. Some websites recovered after rerouting to other providers. Companies, including Hong Kong’s exchange and Southwest, were investigating the incident. The outage did not affect Southwest’s operations.

Akamai features high-level website and application hosting services that large enterprises use to serve content to millions of users simultaneously.

Fastly’s edge computing model places servers in multiple locations to help websites serve users from the closest physical site. The model reduces the lag time, speeds up page-loading, and distributes the load on individual servers.

Price action: AKAM shares closed lower by 1.26% at $116.69 on Wednesday.