CDN issue takes down several carrier websites

An issue with the Edge DNS service from content delivery network (CDN) company Akamai took down a swathe of corporate websites yesterday evening, including carriers FedEx, British Airways and Delta Airlines.

Web services from impacted companies were temporarily affected.

The outage lasted less than an hour and was reportedly not the result of a cyberattack but a software configuration update that triggered a bug.

Reports of issues came from Akamai and Oracle, another CDN company, but Oracle attributed the issue to Akamai.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a central part of the internet that maps domain names (such as transglobalexpress.co.uk) to the unique numerical IP addresses required for a browser to locate the necessary server and load webpage content.

While brief website outages are common, CDN companies like Akamai are designed to provide network back-ups that maintain website availability and reduce disruptions when something goes wrong. It’s also a security measure against cyberattacks.

However, this is the third major incident in the last couple of months where a problem with the content delivery networks themselves has caused huge outages across the internet.

In June, another Akamai outage took down a slew of airline and bank websites, while dozens of websites, including the UK government’s, and even parts of Google and Amazon, were taken down by an issue with CDN company Fastly earlier in the month.

This has led to warnings of overreliance on a small handful of companies when it comes to services relating to internet infrastructure, and the vulnerabilities this creates.

Source: CNN