Akamai Outage: Here’s Why Some E-Commerce Apps Were Not Working
Almost half of the global disruption was caused by a service outage at Akamai, a content delivery and cloud services firm. Akamai is a firm that hosts a large portion of the internet, including Times Group properties.
Here’s all you need to know about the brief but widespread outage:
On July 22, several major online platforms, which include airlines like Delta, e-commerce websites like Amazon and Myntra, food ordering apps like Zomato, transaction apps like PayTm, and OTT platforms like Disney+ Hotstar, gaming brands like Call of Duty, and net banking like SBI and HDFC, among all others, experienced brief outages. PlayStation Network and Steam were two other Akamai websites that were unavailable.
Many internet users and web platforms tweeted on Twitter to report their issues and announced that their app was down… and thus, the company tweeted from its Twitter account that “Akamai is facing some technical glitch,” We’re monitoring it right now and will update within 30 minutes.”
Akamai, an Internet infrastructure provider, verified that it is experiencing an outage about an hour after the reports began. The outage appears to have started about 8.55 p.m. on 22nd July, Thursday, as per Internet outage tracker DownDetector. Although, This is the world’s second major internet outage since June. The previous one occurred on June 8th.
What caused this global internet outage:
The global internet outage was triggered by Akamai Technologies ‘partial outage.’ The majority of websites run their content through cloud service providers and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). When a specific service provider experiences a technical issue, an outage like this occurs. As a result of Akamai’s outage, all of its clients’ websites began to faced issues.
What Akamai said caused the outage:
According to Akamai, the outage was caused by issues with the Edge DNS service. “We are aware of the fact that there is some kind of glitch in the Edge DNS service. We’re investigating the situation right now. Please contact Akamai Technical Support if you have any queries or are suffering any effects as a result of this issue. We are providing you with the most updated information available, which is subject to changes, corrections, and updates, with the intention of protecting time during the downtime, the firm stated.
The majority of websites run their content through cloud service providers and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). When a specific service provider experiences a technical issue, an outage like this occurs. Because Akamai is a popular global service provider, any of its clients will experience issues loading web pages if the service provider goes down.
Thankfully, the outage was brief and did not last long, and most apps and websites are slowly returning to service.
Akamai’s statement on the fix
“Now that we’ve fixed that glitch and all the services are again back to normal, according to the current observations. We’ll keep monitoring the situation to make sure the impact is completely mitigated.”
“We are still keeping track of it to monitor the issue and can assure that this was not the aftereffect of a cyberattack on the Akamai stage,” the statement continued.