Bank, airline sites go dark in Internet outage

Sydney

A PLETHORA of websites operated by financial institutions, governments and airlines including Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing (HKEX) and Australia's central bank went down briefly Thursday in the second global Internet outage in as many weeks.

Some of the outages, including those that affected Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group, were linked to a failure at Akamai Technologies, which helps clients manage web services, said sources. The Reserve Bank of Australia cancelled a scheduled bond-buying operation on Thursday, blaming "technical difficulties". A representative for Akamai in Asia did not respond to requests for comment.

The incident recalled an hour-long global outage earlier this month, triggered by a software failure at content delivery platform Fastly. The resultant cascading failures affected services from Amazon to Shopify and Stripe, and were a stark reminder of how exposed the world's biggest websites are to disruptions ranging from simple human error to coordinated cyber attacks.

Site tracker Downdetector.com on Thursday flagged hundreds of user complaints about outages affecting the likes of Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines. Many of the sites affectedrecovered within the hour, some after rerouting to other providers. Companies including HKEX and Southwest said they were investigating the incident. Akamai is one of several high-level website and application hosting services used by large enterprises to serve content to millions.The global edge computing market was valued at US$4.68 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 38.4 per cent from 2021 to 2028, said Grand View Research. BLOOMBERG