Thousands of Worldwide Websites turned Dark Online

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, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, next to the MIT campus, has rendered huge swaths of the Internet inaccessible due to a massive ‘Edge DNS’ fail.

The Domain Name System (DNS) acts as the internet directory, translating website names (URL) into IP addresses.

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 reported 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.

Shortly before 1 PM 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 cyber-attack, but occurred when a software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system.

RT. com / ABC Flash Point News 2021.